Who Is Richard Greenberg?

Richard Greenberg

Born in 1958, Richard Greenberg is currently one of America’s most prolific and acclaimed playwrights. From East Meadow, New York, Greenberg grew up with his father, an executive at the Century Theatres movie chain and his mother, a housewife. He attended Princeton University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1980. Incidentally, at Princeton, one of his English teachers was famed novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Greenberg went to grad school at Harvard for two years where he studied fiction writing. However, at this point he decided he was more interested in acting, so he left Harvard to try his hand at playwrighting. The first play he wrote earned him acceptance to the prestigious Yale School of Drama, where he earned an MFA in 1985.

Since then, he’s had more than 25 plays and musicals premiere on and off Broadway.

In 1998 his play Three Days of Rain was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. It was revived on Broadway in 2006 where it became famous as the stage debut of Julia Roberts. Greenberg wrote an updated book for the musical Pal Joey, which was eventually mounted as a major Broadway revival in 2008 was nominated for a number of Drama Desk and Tony Awards. Greenberg finally struck awards gold in 2003 with Take Me Out. The play was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in drama, won three Drama Desk Awards (Outstanding Play, Outstanding Actor for Daniel Sunjata and Outstanding Featured Actor for Denis O’Hare), the Drama League Award for Best Play, the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play, The New York City Critic’s Drama Circle Award for Best Play, and three Tony awards (Best Play, Best Featured actor for Denis O’Hare, and Best Direction of a Play for Joe Mantello). Since then he hasn’t stopped - Greenberg’s had ten more plays debut since 2003, the most recent being Assembled Parties which opened on Broadway in 2013 and garnered a Best Featured Actress Tony for actress Judith Light.