David Lindsay-Abaire

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David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright, best known for Fuddy Meers.

He grew up in Boston, Massachusetts in a family of five he describes as "very blue collar." His mother was a factory worker and his father worked for the Chelsea fruit market. He attended Boston public schools until the seventh grade, when he received a six-year scholarship to the Milton Academy, a small, private New England boarding school. It was there that he first became interested in writing for the theatre and where he contributed what he has called "terrible, terrible plays" as a result of the school's tradition of presenting original student work. He went on to concentrate in theatre at Sarah Lawrence College, and was accepted into the highly prestigious Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School, where he wrote under the tutelage of Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang.

Lindsay-Abaire has received commissions from South Coast Repertory, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as awards from the Berilla Kerr Foundation, the Lincoln Center LeComte du Nuoy Fund, Mixed Blood Theater, Primary Stages, the Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival, and the South Carolina Playwrights Festival.

Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and "anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello." Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. "My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity."

He returned to the scene of his Fuddy Meers success, the Manhattan Theatre Club, with Wonder of the World, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, about a wife who suddenly leaves her husband and hops a bus to Niagara Falls in search of freedom, enlightenment, and the meaning of life. Other plays include Rabbit Hole, produced in 2006 with Cynthia Nixon, Tyne Daly, and John Slattery, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play, Kimberly Akimbo (2000), Wonder of the World (2000), Dotting and Dashing (1999), Snow Angel (1999), The L'il Plays (1997,) and A Devil Inside (1997).