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Baby Boy Monaghan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968 and adopted after 11 weeks by a middle class Jewish family in the St. Louis Park suburb of Minneapolis, where he was given the name Matthew "Max" Sparber.
As a child, he grew up a few blocks from where the Coen brothers had grown up, and was baby-sat by both Dan and Matthew Wilson, both later of the band Trip Shakespeare (as well as Semisonic, in the case of Dan Wilson). Monaghan's family had some links to the world of entertainment - his mother is cousins with Judd Hirsch, while his father is a distant cousin of Academy Award-winning composer Lalo Schifrin.
Monaghan attended public schools throughout his childhood, but for a two-year stint at a shirt-lived Jewish high school. He attended the University of Minnesota, from which he never attained his degree.
In his early twenties, Monaghan moved to Los Angeles. Quickly broke and jobless, he spent three months in Citrus House, a homeless shelter run by the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles, although Monaghan is not gay. This experience would continue to inform his later work as a playwright, which has often addressed themes related to poverty and marginalization.
Through the Teen Canteen, another program for homeless youth, Monaghan became part of a theater program begun by actress Shelley Winters (started as the result of a promise by Winters to Marilyn Monroe). Monaghan quickly became the program's writer, penning two plays, both of which were extensively work-shopped but never produced. The program included as one of its organizers actress Clare Carey from the long-running television comedy Coach.
After several years of political work as part of a thriving anarchist scene in Minneapolis, Monaghan moved to Omaha, Nebraska, in the late Nineties. Here he became involved in the Blue Barn Theatre, a well-known regional theater that makes frequent use of Omaha talent such as 'Jill Anderson', Hughston Walkinshaw, and Tim Siragusa. Monaghan penned a play for the Blue Barn titled "Minstrel Show; Or, the Lynching of William Brown, which retold the true story of a 1919 murder of an African American man in Omaha through the eyes of two itinerant black-face performers. Despite being denounced by state senator Ernie Chambers, the play was a hit, and has since been produced extensively throughout the United States, including two New York productions.
Monaghan has worked as a journalist and editor for the past decade, including having been the editor-in-chief of Omaha's newsweekly, The Reader, as well as reviewing theater for City Pages in Minneapolis for three years and having his own arts column at Minnpost. He has occasionally made forays into writing and acting for film.
