Stephen Adly Guirgis

2006 Winner in
Drama

Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member and former co-artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company. He won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Between Riverside and Crazy (Atlantic Theater and Second Stage. 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 Time Magazine & Entertainment Weekly), and The Little Flower of East Orange (with Ellen Burstyn & Michael Shannon). All five of these plays were directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and originally produced by LAByrinth. His play The Motherfucker with the Hat (6 Tony nominations, including Best Play), was directed on Broadway 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 National Theatre, 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 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Laura Pels 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 & Praise

"Guirgis, a brilliant comedic talent . . . also has an original and knowing take on class, particularly as it plays out among the bottom-of-the-barrel working-class poor, who are virtually invisible to the wealthier men and women around them. Guirgis' characters are strivers who lack the language to 'pass' in a white-collar world; they're frustrated by limitations that they're only half aware of, and that frustration provides much of the painful hilarity in their dialogue, which piles miscommunication on top of misunderstanding." —The New Yorker [on The Motherfucker with the Hat]

"[The Last Days of Judas Iscariot] shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk . . . Mr. Guirgis is a zealous and empathic researcher, and he presents dilemmas of ancient Galilee in terms winningly accessible to the twenty-first century . . . " —The New York Times

"…fire-breathing . . . [a] probing, intense portrait of lives behind bars . . . whenever it appears that Jesus is settling into familiar territory, it slides right beneath expectations into another, fresher direction. It has the courage of its intellectual restlessness . . . [Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train] has been written in flame." —The New York Times

Selected Works

Dominica the Fat Ugly Ho (guidomin)
Premiered in
2006
read more >
Outside Links
Video Interview (On Motherfucker with the Hat)
Performance Video (Between Riverside and Crazy)