Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, author of 17 plays, has passed beyond the final curtain. Wilson, a longtime resident of Sag Harbor, Long Island, died yesterday due to complications from pneumonia at a long term acute care facility in Wayne, New Jersey; according to the Steppenwolf Theatre he passed on the eve of the Chicago company's first preview production of a new staging of his Hot l Baltimore, which was a hit Off Broadway in the '70s and later a short-lived TV sitcom. His Broadway plays include Angels Fall (1983), Redwood Curtain (1993), and Burn This (1987), which starred performer John Malkovich.

Wilson also co-founded the Circle Repertory Company, which produced plays by Jules Feiffer, Sam Shepard, Larry Kramer and others. The Times obituary notes that his characters "tended toward the socially marginalized, perhaps no surprise for a man whose identity — Ozark, somewhat rootless, a child of a broken home, gay at a time when it was taboo to be gay — no doubt made him feel pushed to the margins of mainstream culture himself. (Mr. Wilson was noted for being one of the first mainstream playwrights to create central, meaningful gay and lesbian characters.)"

Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri in 1937 and moved with his mother to Springfield Missouri as a boy. In his early 20s he worked as a commercial artist at a Chicago advertising agency, then moved to NYC in 1962, where he later recalled that "he saw and disliked every play on Broadway." His 1965 play Balm in Gilead was such a hit Off Broadway at La MaMa that Ellen Stewart, La MaMa’s founder, "had to stand on the sidewalk each night and beseech an eager fire marshal not to close the theater, packed to capacity," the Times reports.

Upstaged notes that longtime Wilson director Marshall Mason has issued this statement: "To all friends and admirers of Lanford Wilson: Our great writer and my closest friend passed away this morning at 10:45. The doctors say it was a peaceful, painless end. I’m very happy that just a couple of days ago Jeff Daniels and Jon Hogan serenaded him in his hospital room, and that he had the pleasure of hearing his songs. Words cannot express the loss we all will feel, but we must be grateful for the bountiful beauty he bestowed upon us."