Perspectives / Donald Margulies Donald Margulies won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Dinner with Friends, which appeared in the 1998 Humana Festival. He also contributed to Back Story for the 2000 Festival. The real gift of a commission, far greater than the modest financial gain it brings to a playwright, is a theatre’s investment in a writer’s work. My plays July 7, 1994 and Dinner With Friends were both products of commissions for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. While it is likely that I would have continued writing plays with or without those commissions, whether I would have written those plays is something I cannot say for certain. They were both created in the fervor of writing on deadline which, for me, has always provided a fertile climate. With July 7 I purposely set out to write a play that captured a specific day-in-the-life in the hope of revealing universal truths about the way we live our lives. The relatively brief lag time between the play’s inception and its scheduled premiere, in the 1995 Humana Festival, inspired me to reflect on the very day the writing of the play began, July 7, 1994. Within just a few months of its creation, the play would be in rehearsal. The hour-long one-act followed a woman physician seeing patients in an inner-city health clinic over the course of a single day, the date of the title, when the unfolding O.J. Simpson case was becoming a national obsession. Dinner With Friends, which had its world premiere in the 1998 Humana Festival and went on to success in Paris and New York, tapped into the Zeitgeist by accident, not design. Its depiction of marriage and friendship in mid-life struck a chord in ways I could not have predicted when I set out to fulfill my commission. Like all of my plays, Dinner With Friends started from a troubling place from which I set out to find answers. I shall always be grateful to Jon and Michael and all the folks at Actors for their genuine curiosity in seeing what I might come up with next.