About the Author

Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member and former co-artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company, and the 2015 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been produced on five continents and throughout the United States. They include Our Lady of 121st Street (Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle Best Play Nominations), Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train (Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award, Barrymore Award, Olivier Nomination for London’s Best New Play), In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings (2007 LA Drama Critics Best Play, Best Writing Award), The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (10 Best Plays of the Year, Time Magazine & Entertainment Weekly), and The Little Flower of East Orange (with Ellen Burstyn & Michael Shannon). All five plays were directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and were originally produced by LAByrinth. His Broadway debut, The Motherfucker with the Hat (6 Tony nominations, including Best Play), was directed by Anna D. Shapiro and marked his third consecutive world premiere co-production with The Public Theater and LAByrinth. In London, his plays have premiered at The Donmar Warehouse, The Almeida (dir: Rupert Goold), The Hampstead (Robert Delamere), and at The Arts Theater in the West End. Other plays include Den of Thieves (Labyrinth, HERE, HAI, Black Dahlia) and Dominica The Fat Ugly Ho (dir: Adam Rapp) for the 2006 E.S.T. Marathon. He has received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Whiting Award, and a TCG fellowship. He is also a New Dramatists Alumnae and a member of MCC’s Playwright’s Coalition, The Ojai Playwrights Festival, New River Dramatists, and Labyrinth Theater Company. As an actor, he has appeared in theater, film and television, including roles in Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, and Brett C Leonard’s Jailbait opposite Michael Pitt. A former violence prevention specialist and H.I.V. educator, he lives in New York City.

Reviews

“Blurring lines between the sacred and profane has always been a specialty of Mr. Guirgis... Riverside creeps up on you. And every time you think you’ve figured out where it’s going, Mr. Guirgis alters its course, forcing you to readjust your emotional bearings and your take on its characters. I’d locate it somewhere south of cozy and north of dangerous, west of sitcom and due east of tragedy.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

“Guirgis has playwriting nerves of steel. For one thing, he chooses the right kind of worlds to write about: parallel to, but in many ways hidden from, our own, strange enough to fascinate yet recognizable enough to hit home. Language, too: the dialogue is always emotionally specific and accurate to the character, even as it makes the most profane and hilarious leaps... Completely compelling.” – Jesse Green, New York

“Scenes switch from tender to gritty to shocking... Guirgis specializes in stories of working-class heroes and zeroes — and everyone in between.” – Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News

“A wonderful, generous, altogether unpredictable urban tragicomedy.” – Linda Winer, Newsday

“Guirgis, like other storytellers who explore the sacred and the profane, is most interested in how grace transforms us. His empathetic, poetic tales of ex-cons, addicts, and other men whom society would label losers return us, again and again, to a world that Guirgis, by virtue of his particular religion—the church of the streets—illuminates with the bright and crooked light of his faith.” – Hilton Als, New Yorker

“A gem! Quite possibly the author’s most accomplished piece to date. Over the past decade or so, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has become the foremost interpreter of NYC’s Upper West Side — actually, make that Upper, Upper West Side.” – Entertainment Weekly