INDEPENDENCE, KAN.: Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies will be the honoree at the 34th annual William Inge Theatre Festival In April 2015. The four-day event is hosted by the William Inge Center for the Arts.
As part of being an honoree, Margulies will receive a reading of his play The Country House (which recently closed on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club) on Apr. 17, and he will also lead a master class in playwriting. He will also be presented with the William Inge Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater Award on Apr. 19.
“Donald Margulies has delivered a consistently excellent body of work with humor and punch, in one of the most distinctive voices of the American theatre,” said Karen Carpenter, interim artistic director of the Inge Center, in a statement. “Margulies’s ability to excavate both comedy and pathos, in writing about the struggle to belong, to sustain relationships, to find one’s purpose in life, has made a lasting impact and shown us that the heartbreak life gives us can be transforming.”
Margulies joins a roster of Inge awardees, including Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, Wendy Wasserstein and many others. Of the honor, Margulies said in a statement, “I am delighted to receive this career-affirming honor and humbled to find myself in such distinguished company.”
Margulies’s plays include Dinner With Friends (for which he won a Pulitzer in 2000), the Pulitzer-nominated Sight Unseen and the Tony-nominated Time Stands Still.
The William Inge Center for the Arts was founded in 1982. Based on the campus of Independence Community College, it houses a number of manuscripts by Inge, a Kansas native. The center also produces the annual William Inge Theatre Festival. In 2009, the festival was recognized as the state’s official theatre festival.
