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Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

Theater|Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/theater/richard-greenberg-dead.html

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More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York’s upper middle class.

A portrait of Richard Greenberg, a heavyset man with brown hair and glasses, leaning against a wall with his hands folded in front of him.

July 8, 2025, 4:01 p.m. ET

Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.

His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.

A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.

Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.

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From left, Kieran Campion, Lily Rabe, Brenda Pressley, Mercedes Ruehl and Austin Lysy in the Broadway revival of Mr. Greenberg’s “The American Plan” in 2009.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Having once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?

“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”