The playwright

Warren Leight was born in New York City on January 15, 1957, and lived on the Upper West Side. He went to Stanford University in California on a scholarship when he was only sixteen, to study journalism. After graduating in 1977, he returned to New York and began his writing career with a series of articles that eventually formed a collection called The I Hate New York Guidebook (1983). For the next twenty years or so, Leight had sporadic success as journalist, stand-up comic, screenwriter, and movie director. Some of the highlights of those years include a stint as the creative director for a group of female comics, call the High Heeled Women, writing and directing the 1993 film The Night We Never Met, and writing the screenplay for the 1996 film Dear God. It was this last experience, which included several rewrites and the ultimate loss of control over the project that motivated him to write a play for himself.