Deborah Margolin
Montvale, NJ
playwright / performance artist
Deborah Margolin is a playwright, performance artist, actor and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of ten full-length solo performance pieces, which she has toured throughout the United States, and is the recipient of an OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Margolin’s play Imagining Madoff was nominated in 2012 for the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play and the Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production in Boston. Her play Turquoise had a successful workshop production this past summer at Dixon Place in New York, and her solo work, 8 STOPS, had a run at the Cherry Lane Theater in NYC; the New York Times called Margolin "undeniably funny." Margolin enjoyed the idea that the reviewer may have tried to deny the humor of the piece, which she describes as "a comedy concerning the grief of endless compassion," but was unable to do so! Next she wrote the first draft of a new play entitled What Difference Does It Make? under the auspices of New Dramatists. This play is a gift to her daughter Molly who yearns to play the protagonist: a magnificent woman in an evening gown and high heels who sleeps in pajama high heels and is both an attorney and a pastry chef who is hysterical at all times due to her understanding of the fact that she is fictional. Margolin is a proud member of New Dramatists. She writes as a woman in love with the theater, with its way of uniting the word to the body. She is in love with language; with the failure of language, and finds nowhere is the failure of language more celebrated and exonerated than in the theater.
This bio/description was originally published in 2014 and updated in 2015. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).