One of contemporary theater's most prolific scribes, Greenberg has written more than two dozen plays, including Three Days of Rain, The Violet Hour, and gay baseball epic Take Me Out.

Long Island native Greenberg graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, earning an A on his 430-page thesis novel from his advisor, Joyce Carol Oates. He embarked upon a graduate degree in English literature at Harvard, but got bored and dropped out, instead enrolling at Yale Drama School with dreams of being an actor. After dabbling in playwriting, Greenberg decided to quit acting and devote himself to writing full-time, and had his first play hit Broadway, Eastern, Standard in 1989. Since then, he's penned such major shows A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, The Violet Hour, and The American Plan.

Greenberg's most famous play, 2002's Take Me Out, centered around a gay pro baseball player's decision to come out of the closet. The piece won a Tony, Pulitzer and a Drama Desk Award. More recently, in 2006, a Joe Mantello-directed production of Three Days of Rain—a play Greenberg had written in 1997—starring Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper had a limited-run engagement at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. But while audiences flocked to see Julia's Broadway debut, the critical reception was decidedly unkind—the Times' Ben Brantley, for one, called it "wooden and splintered." [Image via Getty]