John Ford Noonan, ‘Coupla White Chicks’ playwright, dies at 77

John Ford Noonan, a playwright who enjoyed a prolific three-decade run marked by one particularly big off-Broadway hit, “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking,” died Sunday in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 77.

“A Coupla White Chicks,” about polaropposite women who end up bonding, opened at the Astor Place Theater in the spring of 1980 with a stellar pairing: Susan Sarandon and Eileen Brennan.

The play, a comedy, ran for more than a year, the original stars giving way to other actresses, including Louise Lasser, JoBeth Williams, Susan Tyrrell, Anne Archer, Candy Clark and Carrie Snodgress.

John Ford Noonan Jr. was born on Oct. 7, 1941, in Stamford, Connecticut. and grew up in Greenwich.

He was teaching high school Latin and other subjects on Long Island when he wrote “The Year Boston Won the Pennant,” which became his first major New York production. Then, in 1972, came “Older People,” a collection of sketches about aging men and women coping with love, sexuality and survival, one of a series of Noonan’s plays produced by Joseph Papp and the Public Theater. Although Noonan was being produced regularly, “A Coupla White Chicks” four years later put him in a different category.

“I made an amount of money from ‘White Chicks’ that embarrassed me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I called it ‘found money’ … and blew it fast.”