About the Plays:

A collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends.

This collection by Donald Margulies features his best short plays, one-acts, and monologues. This volume spans almost 20 years of his writings beginning with Luna Park, an early play based on a short story by Delmore Schwartz, and also includes his well-known one-act July 4, 1994, which is a hauntingly beautiful examination of a female inner city doctor's life. Taken as a whole, the work is an extraordinary representation of a particularly American reality of the twentieth century. His language is exquisite and deceptive in its simplicity, wherein the larger questions of our daily existence emerge and are clarified.

The volume contains three major one-act plays including:
• Luna Park: It's Delmore's 21st birthday in the harshest winter of the Great Depression. There's no cake on the table. That night his dreams treat him to a magical adventure where he's forced to face his past under the dizzying lights of Coney Island's amusement park. Luna Park is an elegiac look at the American past and the immigrant experience of the 1930s. Funny and sizzling with energy. (Cast: 2 female, 2 male, with doubling)
• Pitching to the Star, a darkly comic look at the writers lot in Hollywood. Peter finally gets a good break for his Hollywood script and pitches it to the star of the pilot show. Promised control over something on which he's worked long and hard, Peter finds his integrity and his storyline attacked every time the star makes a suggestion to completely change his script and make the lead character exactly like herself. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male, flexible casting)
• July 7, 1994, the hit of the 1995 Festival of New American Plays at the famed Actors Theatre of Louisville, is a haunting hour-long exploration of a day in the life of a female physician working in an inner-city health clinic. (Cast: 4 female, 2 male)
• also includes fifteen other short plays and monologues

What people say:

"July 7, 1994 ranks as an important work by a gifted and growing American playwright." — Chicago Tribune

About the Playwright:

Donald Margulies is an American playwright, screenwriter, and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play, Dinner With Friends. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalists Sight Unseen and Collected Stories. He has also developed screenplays for HBO, NBC, Paramount, Propaganda, Touchstone, Warner Bros., TriStar and Universal.