"I want people to have a good time at the theatre. I try to write plays that, both in form and content, amuse and challenge an audience. I love the various theatrical and dramatic forms of comedy and tragedy. I like to utilize many of these forms within a single play. My plays have pronounced comedic elements, but I also want them to bite. If there’s no bite, if one does not challenge the audience and oneself ­in a good way, there isn’t as much opportunity for pleasure. And I do think the theatre should offer pleasure." A classicist in experimental clothing, David Greenspan is a playwright who is also passionately involved in the theatre as an actor and director. From his early more autobiographical plays (one of which, Principia, took inspiration from the shifting modalities of Joyce’s Ulysses) to more recent works inspired by (and at times adapted from the work of) Hawthorne, Stein, Molnar, and Thorton Wilder, Greenspan’s theatre is a place where anything can happen. Deliciously complicated, incredibly funny, the work, whether tragic, tender, mysterious or cruel, betrays a profoundly empathic imagination. Both wildly conjured and deeply attentive to diverse literary and theatrical traditions­from vaudeville and Greek mythology to the Bible and boulevard comedy­Greenspan’s plays ask big questions about history, creation, sexual behavior, the complications of family and the very act of performing a play.

Born 1956, Los Angeles, California Lives in New York City 1978 B.A., Drama, University of California at Irvine

	2002	The Argument
	2001	She Stoops to Comedy
	2000	Five Frozen Embryos
	1998	The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion
	1994	Son of an Engineer
	1992	Dog in a Dancing School
	1991	Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain
	1990	2 Samuel 11, Etc.
	1989	The Home Show Pieces
	1987	Principia
	1987	Jack

	1990-93	New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, Director-in-Residence
	1987-90	Home for Contemporary Theater and Art, Playwright-in-Residence

	2001	Whitfield Cook Prize
	1998	New Jersey State Council on the Arts
	1990, 97	Obie Award
	1993-94	New York State Council on the Arts
	1993	Playwrights’ Center, McKnight Fellowship
	1993	Jerome Foundation
	1993	Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation
	1987-89, 92	Art Matters Fellowships
	1989	Charles Revson Foundation
	1989	Rockefeller Foundation

	1999	The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion, Yale Theatre
	1995	Son of an Engineer, Sun and Moon Press
	1993	Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain, in Grove New American Theater, Grove and Weidenfeld
	1991	The Home Show Pieces, in Plays in Process, TCG
	1990	2 Samuel 11, Etc., in Plays in Process, TCG
	1990	Jack, in The Way We Live Now, TCG