The American playwright Richard Greenberg, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was an accomplished and prolific chronicler of the lives of young, upwardly mobile professionals in the 1980s – he himself had first wanted to be an architect. In doing so, he moved American new playwriting on from the era of Sam Shepard and David Mamet; he had no particular axes to grind, and he wrote beautifully.
Every time you saw a play of his – he was once dubbed “the American Noël Coward” – you understood why his household gods were Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton. He was serious, literate, engaging and enlightened.
