Scott McPherson; Playwright, Author of ‘Marvin’s Room’

Scott McPherson, 33, a playwright whose successful “Marvin’s Room” combined inventive comedy with the pathos of illness and death. “Marvin’s Room,” his last completed work and only his second full-length play, had its premiere in Chicago in 1990 and went on to national acclaim, including off-Broadway runs in New York and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The play won the 1992 Outer Critics Circle award for best play, the 1992 Drama Desk award for best play and the Joseph Jefferson award in Chicago for original work, among other honors. McPherson grew up in Ohio and worked in Chicago as an actor and writer. He had completed the screenplay for “Marvin’s Room,” the story of a woman battling leukemia and the family with which she struggles for support and dignity, and was working on a new full-length play. The title character of “Marvin’s Room” is an elderly stroke victim glimpsed throughout only as a motionless form in a bed. In Chicago on Saturday of the complications of AIDS.