In 'Lunar Eclipse' Donald Margulies Looks Inward -- and Skyward

An old farmer is alone in the middle of an open field late at night and he is weeping.

New Haven playwright Donald Margulies envisioned such a scene. “I didn't know why that image came to me,” he said. “I thought this image was really interesting to me and I wanted to know why this man was crying.”

That led to Margulies writing the opening scene of what was to become his new play, “Lunar Eclipse,” which opens May 14 for off-Broadway’s Second Stage at Signature Theatre.

The two-actor play, which received a production in the Massachusetts Berkshires two years ago, stars Tony Award-winner Reed Birney and Lisa Emery (Darlene Snell in the Netflix series “Ozark.”)

“I felt like this is the play I should be writing at this time in my life, my career, and my time on the planet,” said Margulies, 70, from his home in New Haven where he’s lived with his wife, retired internist Lynn Street, for more than 40 years.

The two-actor play, which received a production in the Massachusetts Berkshires two years ago, stars Tony Award-winner Reed Birney and Lisa Emery (Darlene Snell in the Netflix series “Ozark.”)

“I felt like this is the play I should be writing at this time in my life, my career, and my time on the planet,” said Margulies, 70, from his home in New Haven where he’s lived with his wife, retired internist Lynn Street, for more than 40 years.

Though many of his works have an East Coast urban or suburban setting — including “Time Stands Still” and Pulitzer finalists “Collected Stories” and “Sight Unseen” — in “Lunar Eclipse” Margulies was drawn to a different locale. In this play he writes about a rural couple under foreshadowing skies reflecting — sometimes with humor, often times not and always with great difficulty — on marriage and mortality.

That might seem like foreign territory for the playwright but the Brooklyn born-and-raised Margulies spoke of his wife’s Kentucky family where they visited over the years. “My beloved father-in-law, who was a farmer and a Republican, an Episcopalian, was one of those people.”

Margulies said the play takes a hard look at a long marriage can be seen as a “conversation” with his Pulitzer Prize-winning and Connecticut-set show “Dinner With Friends." The 2000 play was a piercing examination of a contemporary couple and their friends at an early stage in their marriages. In a bit of synchronicity, Emery also starred in the original production of “Dinner With Friends.”

But that play isn’t the only work in which audiences might find connections with “Lunar Eclipse.” Margulies — who was a Thornton Wilder Prize recipient in 2018 — has similarities with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilder, who also had New Haven roots. (Wilder went to Yale and lived and is buried in a family plot in Hamden.)

Both “Lunar Eclipse” and Wilder’s “Our Town” deal simply, starkly and unsentimentally with a large sweep of their characters’ lives. Both plays are formally structured and touch on themes of love and marriage, the fleetingness of memory, taking stock of a life, the afterlife and all under a cosmic landscape. In a nod to “Our Town,” Margulies even names his couple George and Em, an homage to the young married couple in the Wilder work.

“One of the things that inspired me was to imagine — and I'm not saying literally — but just as a sort of premise, of what if George and Emily had lived to grow their lives together. I just found that a very moving and interesting idea. What if they actually had another 50 years together?”

Margulies then takes his George and Em at the end of their lives. “The couple in this play,” he said, “are sort of taking stock of what they did in their lives, what they built, what is going to endure and what's not going to endure.”

How does writing so unsparingly about marriage affect his own home life?

“My wife is extraordinarily supportive and understands what it means to be married to a writer,” said Margulies. “Which just means that everything is fair game.”

Margulies continues to teach English and theater studies to Yale undergrads. Also locally, Long Wharf Theatre produced Margulies’ popular “Shipwrecked! An Entertainment,” as well as Margulies’ “The Model Apartment” and the premiere of his “Two Days.”

Margulies is also know for his screenplay for 2015’s “The End of the Tour,” which starred Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg. That critically acclaimed film was based on David Lipsky’s 2011 memoir “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.”

Margulies, who has reworked “Lunar Eclipse” since its previous production, feels the new version, directed by Kate Whoriskey, will especially resonate with people’s present feelings of helplessness, sadness and unknowingness.

“I think it will definitely evoke that in people, though it’s not overt,” he said. “But it touches on speaking about a plot of land to larger worlds, whether it be a country, a planet or the cosmos.”

The Second Stage production of “Lunar Eclipse” runs from May 14 to June 22 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. in New York City.