Stephen Adly Guirgis, a Pulitzer winner for Between Riverside and Crazy, is back on Broadway this season with a new play based on a 51-year-old movie: Dog Day Afternoon, set to begin previews at the August Wilson Theatre March 10 ahead of a March 30 opening night. But, Guirgis shares, the inspiration behind it is a much more modern figure: Luigi Mangione.

“We’re seeing our rights being impeded on,” he says of the story’s contemporary connections. “People make really strong, good points about how evil the healthcare system is in this country, how evil insurance companies are. But then at the same time, does that make it okay for a guy to walk down the street, stalk somebody, and put two bullets in their head and kill them? Those kinds of arguments have always been interesting to me.”

Dog Day Afternoon is based on a real-life 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery. The story initially got national attention because it wasn’t just another bank robbery. A Life Magazine article published the same year as the robbery dug into the unlikely camaraderie that developed between the robbers and their hostages. Those two guys might not have been as attractive as Mangione, but they had similar elements that made them into unlikely folk heroes. These were not hardened career criminals, easy to write off as bad guys.

One of the two robbers, it turns out, was gay. John Wojtowicz robbed the bank primarily to get the money to fund his lover’s gender re-assignment operation and win her love again. Keep in mind this was in 1972—just three years after the Stonewall riots of 1969 that was largely credited with starting the Gay Rights movement, and eight years before homosexuality was decriminalized in New York City.

Reading P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore's original article is a reminder of how the public understanding of queerness and transness has evolved radically since the '70s. One gets the vibe the piece—titled "The Boys in the Bank," a reference to the seminal 1968 Mart Crowley play and later movie The Boys in the Band, about a group of homosexual men in New York City—was intended as a "from the wild side"-type curiosity. The very word "trans" was not even in the lexicon, and the article puts quotes around the word "wife" when describing Wojtowicz's trans partner, and refers to them with male pronouns throughout. Eek!

So it's perhaps unsurprising that when the story ended up inspiring the Oscar-nominated 1975 film, the somewhat-macho Al Pacino starred as Sonny, the character inspired by Wojtowicz, and the queer elements, while mentioned, were downplayed heavily. 

Five decades later, Guirgis doesn’t have to do that for his version. “It’s a love story at its heart,” he says. “They really love each other. They’re also really fucked up. They probably beat each other, and then they cry, and then they love again—and it’s just believable.”

And it's not just the writing that's getting a refresh for 2026. In the 1975 film, Sonny's trans lover Leon is played Chris Sarandon, a cis straight man (married to Tony-winning original Broadway Into the Woods star Joanna Gleason). On stage, the role of Leon will serve as the Broadway debut for trans actor Esteban Andres Cruz.

That still leaves Guirgis in an interesting spot when it comes to bringing this beloved film to the stage. He knows the film is likely to have a sizable fanbase in hetero bridge-and-tunnel types, which isn't exactly the expected crowd for a queer love story. But he's not worried. “If you got a heart, you’re going to fall for the love story.”

And, maybe more importantly for that specific audience sector, he knows that he’s tasked with delivering some version of the movie they’ve been loving for decades. “There’s certain elements that I feel like I owe the audience,” he shares. “Sonny [Jon Bernthal on Broadway] will scream, ‘Attica!’” Bernthal’s costar from FX’s The Bear, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, will play Sonny’s co-conspirator Sal.

But he’s still focused on making this play uniquely Guirgis. And all that comes, he says, from digging into that complexity. Guirgis loves the way the story plays with your sympathies as it unfolds. For some audience groups, Sonny’s queer identity will make him inherently likeable, his actions understandable. For others, it’ll do the opposite. That’s what Guirgis finds so interesting about this story, but also the ways that the world—and especially NYC—has changed since 1972.

Guirgis would know. Born in 1965 and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the playwright grew up in the very world his play revisits; a world that was grittier, more dangerous. “I wasn’t mugged once when I was a kid—I was mugged half a dozen times,” Guirgis says. “Crime was just part of living in New York at the time.”

Mayor Rudy Guiliani famously led the effort to fix that and “clean up” the streets in the ‘90s and early aughts, and the NYC of today is incredibly different. But, Guirgis says, a lot of native New Yorkers think a side effect of that effort also took away this city’s heart.

“Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in New York was amazing because it was dangerous, but there was a tremendous amount of freedom,” Guirgis shares. “You could go wherever you want, do whatever you want. I don’t think anybody wants to go back to financial ruin and rampant crime, but there was something to that period that was exciting.”

And, of course, he hopes that will provide a nice backdrop to this particular story. Despite the political, moral, and ethical questions at its heart, Dog Day Afternoon, Guirgis says, will still be an exciting evening at the theatre. It is still about a bank robbery, after all.

“There’s a lot of different issues that are swimming in my crazy brain, while at the same time I’m trying to spit out a suspenseful story that entertains and challenges the audience.”