(Alexis Soloski’s article appeared in The New York Times, 6/11; via Pam Green.)
When the playwright Joshua Harmon was 10, his grandmother handed him a copy of a play and told him that if he read it, she would take him to see it on Broadway. After several weeks, he finished the script, and then they went to the show. “I was very excited,” he said recently over drinks. The play was Euripides’ “Medea,” which is not exactly children’s theater, unless you like your children violently murdered. “I loved it,” he said.
Mr. Harmon grew up to become a writer of cruel, tender and very funny plays. As in “Medea,” his chief interest is family, both the families we’re born into and the ones we create through friendship and romantic love. Still his plays have better jokes than your average Greek tragedy and none have much of a body count, not even the “New York Spring Spectacular,” which he wrote for the Rockettes.