"My plays are fairly diverse, but their unifying theme is loss. . . . The ways that people deal with the effect of time, which invariably entails loss, is probably what unites all these works," explained Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Donald Margulies in an online interview for the Public Broadcasting System's Hollywood Presents series. "I am a second-generation American Jew. I grew up among immigrant Jews, and I think that really has informed my worldview. And it certainly has figured prominently in many of my plays, the notion of identity and questions of assimilation and where one fits in the world."

Margulies was born in Brooklyn in 1954. According to William C. Boles in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Margulies's "mother worked in offices while also raising her two children, while his father was a wallpaper salesman who left for work at six in the morning and did not return home until eleven...