David Lindsay-Abaire (Photo by Deborah Lopez )

David Lindsay-Abaire (Playwrights ’98) has been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama for Rabbit Hole, his fourth play produced by the Manhattan Theater Club. The play ran at M.T.C.’s Biltmore Theater on Broadway from January 12-March 19 and starred Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly. In an unusual move, the play was chosen by the 17-member Pulitzer board even though it was not one of the three plays nominated by the five-member jury.

Boston native Lindsay-Abaire’s first success was Fuddy Meers, produced by M.T.C. in 1999, which eventually transferred to the Minetta Lane Theater for a commercial run and has since received more than 300 productions around the country and abroad. Other plays include Wonder of the World (Woolly Mammoth Theater and M.T.C.), which was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award, and Kimberly Akimbo (South Coast Rep and M.T.C.), which received an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award, among others. He is currently working on the Broadway-bound musicals High Fidelity and Shrek, as well as screen adaptations of Kimberly Akimbo and Cornelia Funke’s novel Inkheart. Often dark and funny at the same time, Lindsay-Abaire’s plays have been described as “walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy.” He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College as well as Juilliard, where he was in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program from 1996-98. (Another Juilliard playwright, David Auburn, won a Pulitzer in 2001 for his play Proof.)