The second son of Robert and Charlene Margulies, Donald Margulies was born on September 2, 1954, in Brooklyn (Coney Island), New York. His father was a wallpaper salesperson who unhappily worked long hours for forty years at the same company yet was always frightened of being fired. His mother was a positive, education-oriented woman who worked in various offices when her children were young.

An exception to Robert Margulies’ often withdrawn nature was his love of Broadway musicals. He enjoyed listening to original-cast recordings during his rare free time, and when his son was nine, he took his family into Manhattan for a Broadway vacation. Although the young boy loved musical comedies, he felt privileged to enjoy Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns. This comedy introduced Donald Margulies to art as a representation of life, specifically the complex relationship between fathers and sons that would eventually inhabit his early work.

Another seminal work in Donald Margulies’ intellectual evolution was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949), which he read at age eleven. Miller’s deeply moving drama of a frightened father, mother, and two sons in Brooklyn resonated loudly with Margulies as a reflection of his own life. Other inspiring literary “fathers” were J. D. Salinger, who understood the youngster’s adolescent angst and confusion, and Philip Roth, whose writings honestly taught Margulies about being a Jewish man.

Margulies got an odd bit of encouragement about his own writing abilities in 1972 when his school principal censored a short story the John Dewey High School senior had written, only to have the U.S. District Court rule in favor of young Margulies. Art was another great talent and interest for Margulies. He earned an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute, where he studied for eighteen months. He found that the process of creating his favorite form, collage, collage, was not unlike playwriting.

When Margulies transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase, the works of writer/collagist Kurt Schwitters, portrait artist Alberto Giacometti, and mixed-media artist Robert Rauschenberg served as artistic influences. However, the theater still intrigued him. Theater critic and professor Julius Novick became his literary mentor, and Margulies discovered more literary “fathers” in novelist William Faulkner and dramatist Harold Pinter.

After graduating from college, Margulies supported himself briefly as a graphic designer. Concurrently, he worked with Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Jeffrey Sweet, and others in a writing group called the New York Writer’s Bloc , from which Margulies derived great creative inspiration.

Pals (1978) was Margulies’ first theatrical examination of his relationship with his father. In 1982, Resting Place (his only play written in free verse) and Luna Park, adapted from a short story by Delmore Schwartz (an author Margulies admired), were produced. In 1983, the Jewish Repertory Theatre produced his play Gifted Children, which grew from the Writer’s Bloc experience.

While Gifted Children and the subsequent Found a Peanut were not critical successes, Margulies moved on with What’s Wrong with This Picture?, in which he dealt with his relationship with his father after his mother’s death in 1978. The play was produced Off-Broadway in 1985 and 1990 and on Broadway in 1994. Margulies continued with the black comedies The Model Apartment in 1988 and The Loman Family Picnic in 1989; between the two, he briefly wrote and produced a television series, Baby Boom. His 1990 one-act play, Pitching to the Star, is a savagely funny satire on Hollywood hypocrisy.

His first major critical success that broke in setting and theme from his earlier work, Sight Unseen , was an outgrowth of a...