Warren Manzi

Warren Manzi, author of the longest running play in NYC history, Perfect Crime, died on February 11, 2016 in Lawrence Massachusetts after a brief illness. Born in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1955, Manzi was a playwright, actor and director. In 1980, while playing Mozart on Broadway in Amadeus, Warren Manzi wrote his first full-length play, Perfect Crime. The play was optioned for Broadway by Morton Gottlied making Warren - then, age twenty-five - the youngest American ever to have a play optioned for Broadway. Within a year, Mr. Manzi was hired by Universal Studios to write the screenplay for "Clue", and was paid what was believed to be then (1981) the largest amount ever paid for a first screenplay.

Perfect Crime has played Off-Broadway since April 18, 1987. In addition, Manzi wrote and directed Cleo Liberman’s All Girl Review, The Award and Other Plays, and Stages, all of which have been produced in New York.

When it first opened in April of 1987, Perfect Crime ran over two and a half hours. Manzi would frequently sit in the theater and listen to audience response and rewrite almost every night for several years, correcting confusing passages, editing unnecessary information and making the show tighter. Actors would get rewrites sometimes daily – even occasionally at intermission. The play now runs one hour and fifty minutes and until the day he died, Manzi checked on the running time of scenes to make sure the actors were keeping up the pace.

The show has a reputation for being confusing but fans often congregate in the lobby exchanging ideas about clues and then checking to see if they are correct with the “Perfect Crime Answer Key” handed out after the show to interested audience members.

In addition, Mr. Manzi directed Matt Cutugno's Incommunicado, Three Sisters, the world premieres of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Between Time and Timbuktu and Samm-Art Williams' Cork, and George Kaiser's From Morning to Midnight, Keith Reddin's Rum & Coke, Heathcote Williams' The Local Stigmatic, and Durrenmatt's The Visit.

Manzi was a 1980 graduate of the Yale School of Drama. He appeared on Broadway in Amadeus and in the films "Nuts", "The Manhattan Project", and "The Defection of Simas Kurdika". He was the Artistic Director of the Actors Collective for many years. When he died he was working on a novel and several short stories.