Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.
His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.
A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.
Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.
Having once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?
“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”
At a time when American theater, especially the Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway worlds he mostly inhabited, was enthralled with postmodern gimmickry and elaborate structural innovations, Mr. Greenberg’s plays could seem like something of a throwback.
With loose but straightforward plots, he relied on Ginzu-sharp dialogue and meticulously drawn characters to pull his plays along. Newsday called him the “Noël Coward of the ‘Brady Bunch’ generation.”
In “Eastern Standard,” one character describes another’s emotional outburst as “Medea minus the proportion.” In “The Assembled Parties” (2013), one character says that her comatose mother will “wake up expressly to make you feel terrible.”
He set many of his plays in Manhattan and its socioeconomic satellites — the Hamptons, the Catskills — but his interests ranged farther. “The Dazzle” (2002), about a doomed pair of pack-rat brothers, was set in the 1940s, while “Take Me Out” dealt with a major league baseball player’s decision to publicly reveal his homosexuality.
Along with the Tony Award for best play, “Take Me Out” won the same honor from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (It was revived on Broadway in 2022.)
Mr. Greenberg was prolific: He wrote more than 30 produced plays, including original works, adaptations and one-acts, as well as the occasional television script. At one point in 2006 he had five plays in production — four new scripts and a Broadway revival of his 1997 play “Three Days of Rain,” starring Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper and Paul Rudd.
“All I ever do is write,” he told American Theatre magazine that year. “I imagine a play, and I’m rehearsing scenes with myself. By the time I actually get to writing down a play, it’s largely secretarial.”
Mr. Greenberg was sometimes criticized for not dealing more aggressively with social issues — “Eastern Standard” is set in New York in the 1980s but only glancingly addresses AIDS and homelessness — and for his sympathetic interest in the architects, lawyers and writers who populate his plays.
He conceded the first criticism, which was one reason he didn’t like to see his earlier plays revived. But he bristled at the second.
“The idea that the moral and personal lives of the middle class do not constitute a subject worthy of consideration is a kind of fascism to me,” he told The Times in 1988, “a censoriousness saying that we know everything there is to know about them.”
Richard Greenberg was born on Feb. 22, 1958, in East Meadow, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Leon, was an executive for a chain of movie theaters, and his mother, Shirley (Levine) Greenberg, ran the household.
He absorbed the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school and aspired to follow his path to becoming a novelist; he chose Princeton for college largely because Fitzgerald had also gone there.
He graduated with a degree in English in 1980 and then enrolled in Harvard’s doctoral program in literature — more as a place-holder while he tried to establish his writing bona fides than out of a sincere desire to enter academia.
Mr. Greenberg regularly skipped classes and used his free time to write a play, which he submitted as part of his application to the playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama. When he was accepted, he dropped out of Harvard.
While at Yale he wrote a play, “The Bloodletters,” about a Jewish teenager on Long Island who develops a rare disease that makes him smell like a dirty bathroom. In 1984, he sent it to the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan in hopes of landing a summer job; he didn’t get the position, but the theater put on the play that fall.
The next year it won the George Oppenheimer Award for the best New York debut production by an American playwright.
Frank Rich, reviewing “The Bloodletters” for The Times, wrote that the play was “so daffily conceived that one must admire its promising author’s antic spin of mind even when he is straining too hard.”
Mr. Greenberg soon signed a contract with South Coast Repertory, a theater company in Costa Mesa, Calif., where several of his plays made their debut before traveling to Broadway.
Along with his sister-in-law, he is survived by his brother, Edward.
Mr. Greenberg was notably press shy, and happiest when he was home, alone, writing. Above all he hated seeing his plays performed with an audience.
“I find the experience very difficult,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2009. “I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one’s there; that’s kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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