Spotlight on One of NYC’s Favorite Playwrights: Stephen Adly Guirgis

Many playwrights have set plays in New York City, but few have done so quite like Stephen Adly Guirgis. The winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (for his play Between Riverside and Crazy, which is gearing up for a Broadway production with Second Stage in fall 2022), Guirgis creates stories and characters that spring from his personal experiences as a lifelong New Yorker, from growing up in a small apartment on the Upper West Side to working as a violence prevention specialist in New York prisons. Described by one critic as “like being hugged and slapped at the same time,” his plays reflect a unique, unvarnished slice of New York life — one you won’t find in tourist brochures — and allow people who are all too often marginalized to take center stage.

Some of the things that make Guirgis one of New York City’s favorite playwrights are:

His lifelong dedication to New York.

In an age in which people are increasingly mobile, it’s intriguing to learn that Stephen Adly Guirgis has more or less stayed put. Born and raised in Manhattan where the Upper West Side meets Harlem, Guirgis attended a Catholic grammar school on 121st Street at the insistence of his mother, a devout Catholic. After studying acting in the theater department of the University at Albany, Guirgis returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s. Following some time spent working as a freelance actor, Guirgis was invited to join the LAByrinth Theater (then a small, newly-formed artistic collective focused on the stories and experiences of minority groups, now a nationally renowned ensemble). In 1995 he was asked to write a play for his fellow company members, and the enormous critical success that greeted the show, a one-act called Francisco and Benny, launched Guirgis’ career as a playwright.

Even as his career has taken off, however, Guirgis’ commitment to New York has remained. His plays are produced all over the country as well as internationally and he has spent time writing for film and television, but he remains true to his native city and his LAByrinth roots. In interviews, he has said that he will always consider his artistic home to be the LAByrinth Theater. As for his physical home, Guirgis still lives on the Upper West Side in the same Riverside Drive apartment where he grew up.

His use of specific New York locations in his plays.

One quality that makes Guirgis’ plays special is his use of highly specific New York locations. The stories you see onstage aren’t set in some kind of generic idea of New York; on the contrary, the locations are so precise that they are almost a character in and of themselves. For example, Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, one of Guirgis’ earlier plays, is set in the Rikers Island prison — one of the world’s largest correctional institutions — and the play’s title is a reference to the New York subway line that connects Harlem and the Upper West Side with points south. Similarly, Our Lady of 121st Street, one of Guirgis’ best-known plays, is set on the same Harlem street where Guirgis himself went to school.

His knowledge of the quirky details of New York life.

As any New Yorker will tell you, there are plenty of details about life in New York that you won’t find anywhere else. In Guirgis’ works, these details are often key elements of the story, once again resulting in plays that resonate with a highly specific sense of place. For example, in Between Riverside and Crazy, his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the heart of the plot revolves around the very New York-centric rules of rent control as well as pressure from the white-hot market for real estate on Riverside Drive.

His love of “real-life” language.

One of the comments most often made about Guirgis’ plays is that his characters speak the way real New Yorkers do. In other words, Guirgis’ dialogue isn’t mannered and doesn’t sound forced; on the contrary, his characters sound just like people you might run into on the street, in the park, or on the subway. One critic credits this effect to Guirgis’ “command of their slang,” and to the fact that he is “always paying a lot of attention to the people around [him].” Guirgis himself has said that he “just grew up really falling in love with the language and the rhythms of street and slang. It’s like music to [him].”

His commitment to bringing communities together.

Guirgis has described the main goal of his plays as simply to bring people together for a rewarding, communal experience. As he puts it: “A play is not a cure for cancer. But it’s going to create a community to perform it, and it’s going to be performed for a community, and when those communities are spicy, when [there’re] different ingredients in the pot, that to me is the most beautiful thing.”

Bringing a variety of people together — few things are more New York than that.