David Lindsay-Abaire

Playwright

• Born: November 30, 1969
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Contribution: David Lindsay-Abaire is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright best known for his play Rabbit Hole (2006). In 2010, the play was adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman. He adapted his 2001 play Kimberly Akimbo into a Tony Award-winning musical that premiered on Broadway in 2022.

Background

David Lindsay-Abaire was born David Abaire on November 30, 1969, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in South Boston, known to its working class residents as Southie. His father was a fruit vendor and his mother worked in a factory. From an early age, Lindsay-Abaire was acutely aware of his family’s economic and social status. As a child, he would help his father sell fruit on the corner across from Boston University’s Huntington Theatre and wonder went on inside its walls. In grade school, Lindsay-Abaire spent his afternoons at the local Boys and Girls Club. Counselors at the club helped him earn a scholarship to Milton Academy, a prestigious prep school outside of Boston. Lindsay-Abaire has said that the scholarship changed his life.

At Milton Academy, Lindsay-Abaire studied acting and began writing plays. As a student at Milton, he was very in tune to the dichotomy between his academic life in a wealthy suburb and his home life in South Boston. After graduating from Milton Academy, he studied acting and playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He graduated with a degree in theatre in 1992 and moved to New York City, where he worked in arts administration at the Dance Theater Workshop. He earned a spot in the playwriting program at Juilliard in 1996, where he studied under Pulitzer Prize–winner Marsh Norman and absurdist playwright Christopher Durang.

Career

A Devil Inside, Lindsay-Abaire’s first New York production, premiered at Soho Rep in January 1997. The play, a send-up of nineteenth-century Russian novels, is about a woman with a tragic past who runs a New York City laundromat. It starred Marylouise Burke, a middle-aged actor who became something of a muse for Lindsay-Abaire. Burke also appeared in his next play, which he had written as a student at Juilliard. The absurdist comedy Fuddy Meers premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City in November 1999. Many people consider the play—a farce about a woman who has her memory erased every time she goes to sleep—Lindsay-Abaire’s first major work.

Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy Wonder of the World premiered in November 2001 at the Manhattan Theater Club. The play—about a woman’s quest to break free of her sheltered life and disastrous marriage—starred Sarah Jessica Parker, who was widely popular at the time due to the success of her television program Sex and the City (1998–2004). Lindsay-Abaire’s play Kimberly Akimbo premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California in 2000. The play is about a sixteen-year-old girl who suffers from a rare disease that makes her age at an accelerated rate. Lindsay-Abaire wrote the role specifically for his colleague Burke. The play had its New York premiere at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2003.

In February 2006, the Manhattan Theatre Club produced Lindsay-Abaire’s play Rabbit Hole, with actors Cynthia Nixon and John Slattery in the roles of two parents grieving the death of their young son. Like many of Lindsay-Abaire’s plays, Rabbit Hole finds levity in grief, although its realist style differs from his more surrealist works. Rabbit Hole lost the Tony Award for Best Play to Alan Bennett’sThe History Boys in 2006, but won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Lindsay-Abaire adapted the play into a well-received film that premiered in 2010, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart.

Since his childhood, Lindsay-Abaire had endeavored to write a play about class issues and the visceral economic divide he experienced as a young man. This effort yielded the play Good People, which premiered in March 2010 at the Manhattan Theatre Club. The production starred Frances McDormand, who won a Tony Award for Best Actress in her role as Margie Walsh. Walsh is a struggling single mom from South Boston who reconnects with a high school fling—a man who has made much more of his modest beginnings. Good People was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2011 and received the 2010 Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play of 2010–11, and the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for outstanding new American play. His Off-Broadway play Ripcord, about two women who are odd-couple roommates at a New Jersey assisted living facility, premiered at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2015.

Lindsay-Abaire began working in the film industry early in his playwriting career. His first screenplay was for the animated film Robots (2005). He went on to write Inkheart (2008), the animated children’s movie Rise of the Guardians (2012), and Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)—a prequel to The Wizard of Oz starring James Franco. He also wrote the screenplays for the 2015 update of Poltergeist and for the 2015 film adaptation of Kevin Wilson's novel The Family Fang (2011).

Lindsay-Abaire wrote the books for several musicals, including the short-lived High Fidelity (2008), based on the Nick Hornby novel, and Shrek the Musical (2008), which ran for two years on Broadway and won a slew of honors, including nominations for eight Tony Awards, four Olivier Awards, and a Grammy. Lindsay-Abaire's lyrics for the musical won him the Ed Kleban Award for most promising musical theater lyricist in the United States. He teamed up with the same composer from Shrek the Musical to adapt his play Kimberly Akimbo into a musical as well. The show first appeared Off-Broadway in 2021, receiving widespread praise and a sold-out run. It premiered on Broadway in November 2022 at the Booth Theatre and went on to garner the most awards of any show at the 2023 Tony Awards ceremony, including the awards for best musical, best book, and best original score.

Impact

Lindsay-Abaire has been praised for creating works with strong and complex female characters. Critics have also praised his ability to explore dark subject matter such as the death of a child, terminal illness, and poverty with a light touch. He credits his upbringing, characterized by both hardship and luck, with his ability to see both the comedy and tragedy of life.

Personal Life

Abaire married actor Christine Lindsay in 1994. They have two children and live in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliography

Blair, Elizabeth. “Familiar Folks Make Up a Play’s Good People.” NPR. National Public Radio, 18 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 July 2013.

Brantley, Ben. “Setting Forth, the Wind in Her Sails.” New York Times. New York Times, 2 Nov. 2001. Web. 20 July 2013.

Ehren, Christine. “Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo with Burke Exits South Coast Rep May 13.” Playbill. Total Theater, 13 May 2001. Web. 20 July 2013.

Grein, Paul. "'Kimberly Akimbo' Is Top Winner at 2023 Tony Awards: Full Winners List." Billboard, 11 June 2023, www.billboard.com/music/awards/2023-tony-awards-full-winners-list-kimberly-akimbo-top-winner-1235351293/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Hodgman, John. “Crossover: The Musical.” New York Times. New York Times, 13 Feb. 2005. Web. 20 July 2013.

Marks, Peter. “Finding the Humor and the Hope in Fractured Lives.” New York Times. New York Times, 12 Mar. 2000. Web. 20 July 2013.

McGrath, Charles. “A Return to Southie, by Way of Broadway.” New York Times. New York Times, 6 Feb. 2011. Web. 20 July 2013.

Piepenburg, Erik. “David Lindsay-Abaire and Naomi Wallace Receive Horton Foote Prize.” New York Times. New York Times, 3 Sept. 2012. Web. 20 July 2013.

Pogrebin, Robin. “A Playwright Who Casts His Muse.” New York Times. New York Times, 2 Feb. 2003. Web. 20 July 2013.

Rosenstein, Anna. “What’s a Fuddy Meers?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Block Communications, 1 Mar. 2002. Web. 20 July 2013.

Stevens, Alexander. “He Didn’t Build It Alone.” Patriot Ledger [Quincy, MA]. GateHouse Media, 14 Sept. 2012. Web. 20 July 2013.