In the spring of 1979, in the waning weeks of Richard Greenberg ’80’s junior year, he spent long evenings in rehearsals for Theatre Intime’s production of The Children’s Hour, the Lillian Hellman play about a malicious, destructive, and false allegation that two leaders at a private school were engaged in a lesbian relationship. In that era at Princeton, still in the first decade of coeducation, shortly after the founding of the University’s first gay student organization, long before most gay students felt free to come out, nobody in the cast of The Children’s Hour spoke openly about their sexuality.
“Rich didn’t come out till later, I didn’t, the others didn’t,” recalls the show’s director, Kate Raisz ’80. “Yet somehow, we found each other, all sotto voce. The play explored the shame and the punishment of being gay or lesbian, and we talked about our characters, but not about ourselves. Princeton wasn’t yet a comfortable place for that; we were all experimenting, confused.”
Greenberg, who died July 4 of cancer at age 67, struck his fellow students then — and many of his colleagues in theater in later years — as deeply private, an intense, serious, yet warmhearted friend. His fellow actors and even his roommates had hardly a notion that Greenberg wanted to spend his life writing, let alone any expectation that he would become one of the most celebrated playwrights of the latter half of the 20th century, writing more than 30 plays and winning the Tony Award for Best Play in 2003 for Take Me Out, the story of a Major League Baseball player who comes out as gay. Yet even at that early stage in Greenberg’s development, his fellow actors could see him blossoming in the theater, where he would spend his life turning his observations of people into revelatory dialogue about the struggle to find and keep love.
Greenberg’s senior thesis, a 430-page novel called A Romantic Career, took place at a Princeton “re-imagined,” as he put it, as “Liberty University.” Elements of Greenberg’s life are sprinkled through the novel’s characters, one of whom comes to college from “a marginal section of a fashionable Long Island town.” Greenberg grew up in not-so-fashionable Mineola. On their first day together, that character’s freshman-year roommate asks him, “What are you?” The reply is like something out of a Richard Greenberg play: “Well, actually, I’ve been having some problems with that question lately.”
In the novel, Greenberg describes the college as “the richest, sweetest, most profoundly affecting university in the country. It does not so much excite romantic expectations as fulfill them, and by fulfilling them, inspire a life-long, head-long devotion.” Although Greenberg never wrote a play specifically about Princeton, the university he experienced as a student shows up again and again in his work — in the biting literary wit of his characters’ repartee, in the affluent settings of his family dramas, and in what former New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley calls Greenberg’s “lyrical blend of hope and fatalism.”
The Times once called Greenberg the “bard of American privilege,” and Brantley tells PAW that Greenberg “had a very poignant sense of history, that we could never escape the past. Like Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald [1917], he was very aware that people could never really know where they came from.” Greenberg’s plays were often about time, about what inexorably happens to people no matter how they fight against it.
His characters speak in carefully structured paragraphs that, as Brantley says, “you associate with another era of playwriting.” In plays such as Eastern Standard (1988), a comedy about yuppies and wealth inequalities, or Three Days of Rain (2006), about the anguish of grown children uncovering their late parents’ secret pasts, Greenberg’s language allowed his characters to transcend their real-life vocabulary and reach for a romantic ideal. His people could aim wonderfully wicked insults and quips at each other (Greenberg honed that skill in his theater reviews in The Daily Princetonian — “the emotional temperature of” Harold Pinter’s Betrayal was “arctic,” he wrote, adding that the playwright suffered from “utter horror at the thought of committing an insight.”) But Greenberg was at his most affecting when his characters painfully spoke past one another.
“I don’t think his people ultimately can connect,” Brantley says. “Even the people you’re closest to are ultimately very remote.”
Profiles of Greenberg through the years picked up on that distance his characters often displayed. Reporters tended to describe him as “reclusive” or “a shut-in,” but friends say he was eager to engage, delighted in the play of their children, and loved to gossip with theater buddies. His empathy bursts through in many of his characters: It’s what allows them to face the mysteries in their lives. They tend to do so with sadness, but with hope, too. At the end of The Assembled Parties, his 2013 play that traces the path of an upper-class Jewish family from one Christmas party to another, two decades later, the dying protagonist’s last words are “Everything’s so … promising, isn’t it?”
Greenberg majored in English at Princeton and studied creative writing with Joyce Carol Oates. He went on to Yale’s drama school and spent the early years of his career churning out one-act plays for small theaters in New York and Los Angeles. His breakthrough came in 1988, when then-Times theater critic Frank Rich gave him a rave review for Eastern Standard, which the critic praised for being at once a throwback to the screwball comedies of the pre-World War II era and an of-the-moment reckoning with the scourges of AIDS and Wall Street greed.
Critics sometimes complained that Greenberg was too prolific, perhaps diluting his impact. But among actors, he won near-universal praise for the words he put in their mouths. “He wrote magnificently for actors,” as Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty put it, “endowing them with powers of speech that surpass the capacities of most mere mortals.”
Those words could be witty and sharp, but the most powerful of Greenberg’s lines often swept aside the curtains of defensiveness and performance that people hide behind, revealing a raw longing, a gnawing loneliness at the heart of a life spent chasing meaning.
Marc Fisher ’80 is a freelance magazine writer who spent four decades at The Washington Post.
No responses yet