The American playwright (1938-2020) had a new work on Broadway in each of the past six decades. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Theater Hall of Fame, he received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019. He also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award, four Tony Awards (Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime). Among many other honors were an Emmy Award, four Drama Desk Awards, and two Obie Awards. In addition to the libretti for Jake Heggie’s Great Scott and Dead Man Walking, he wrote such acclaimed plays as Mothers and Sons, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, A Perfect Ganesh, Corpus Christi, Bad Habits, Next, The Ritz, It’s Only a Play, Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?, The Stendhal Syndrome, and the musicals The Visit, The Fully Monty, and Anastasia.
