Romulus Linney, 1930–2011

Though he never became a household name, Romulus Linney’s prolific output of critically acclaimed plays hardly went unnoticed in the theater world. He won two Obie awards for his work off-Broadway, including one for “sustained excellence in playwriting,” along with two National Critics Awards and three Drama-Logue Awards. He was also awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “In terms of scope of ambition,” wrote The New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley in 1996, “Mr. Linney may be our bravest living playwright.”

Linney was born in Philadelphia but had deep roots in the South and grew up largely in North Carolina and Tennessee. “The classical name of Romulus has a long history in the family,” said Playbill.com; “his great-grandfather was Republican Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney.” After attending Oberlin College and the Yale School of Drama, he joined the “literary strivers” who populated New York cafés and bars in the 1950s and ’60s. Linney wrote several novels, but it was his more than 30 plays that made his literary reputation. When New York’s Signature Theatre Company, which devotes each season to a single playwright, opened in 1991, Linney was the first playwright to have his work featured.

“His work was redolent of artistic seriousness but nonetheless intended to entertain,” said The New York Times. Among Linney’s best-known works are True Crimes, from 1996, and Childe Byron, from 1977. The first is “a gothic tale of lust, greed, and murder set in Appalachia in 1900 that draws on a 19th-century episode in Russia that Tolstoy wrote about as well”; the latter “imagines barbed encounters between the poet Lord Byron and his estranged daughter, for which Mr. Linney said he drew on memories of his divorce and his separation from his elder daughter,” the actress Laura Linney. The playwright ranged over a broad expanse of subjects, including the Vietnam War and the Nuremberg trials, and the lives of writers August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Delmore Schwartz, and Anna Akhmatova. But the southern Appalachia of his youth was a recurring source of Linney’s drama. “A Southern childhood is a very primal thing,” he said in a 1987 interview.

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Over the years, Linney taught at Princeton and Columbia universities, Hunter College, and the New School. Only one of his plays ever made it to Broadway—The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks, in which opposition to President Nixon’s war policies leads to a crime. The play closed after seven previews and five performances, said Variety, and that was the last Linney saw of the Great White Way. Linney said it was “frustrating” that he hadn’t won fame, but that he wouldn’t have changed his writing to gain it. “The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny,” Linney said. “When this is all over, my writing will add up to the sum total of me.”