Christopher Durang was a playwright and actor from Montclair, New Jersey. He wrote the plays Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Tony Award), Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Adrift in Macao, Miss Witherspoon (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Betty’s Summer Vacation (Obie Award), Sex and Longing, Laughing Wild, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Baby with the Bathwater, Beyond Therapy (adapted into a film co-written by Durang), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Obie Award, adapted into a telefilm by Durang), The Vietnamization of New Jersey, and The Idiots Karamazov (with Albert Innaurato). His short plays include Wanda’s Visit, A Stye of the Eye, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, The Actor’s Nightmare, Titanic, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, ‘dentity Crisis, and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. In addition, he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical A History of the American Film. For television, he wrote for the series My America, Trying Times, and Comedy Zone in addition to co-writing the telefilm Off-Hollywood. As an actor, he appeared in the films The Out-of-Towners (re-make), Simply Irresistible, The Cowboy Way, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter, The Butcher’s Wife, and The Secret of My Success as well as episodes of Frasier and Tales from the Crypt. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama and Harvard University. He died in Pipersville, Pennsylvania.
I had written three plays by 1998 and had caught the bug, as it were. Back then, I averaged only a couple of hours of sleep at night. One can do that at that age, I suppose. I was up on one of these long nights and picked up a book on my nightstand that I had borrowed from the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ (ASFA) play library—it’s the same copy I have now as most of my teacher’s collection was bequeathed to me. The book was Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays. I said, “My. 27. Better write another one if I’m to keep up” and, later that night, my first play edging toward maturity, A Plumber’s Story, was composed. I realize this is not a story about Durang’s work inspiring me, but more about his voluminous bibliography, but it was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news that Durang had passed away due to aphasia, with which he had been living for some time. It should be noted that many of the plays in the above-mentioned collection have given me years of laughter. I suppose the first thing folks of when they see a Durang play is how funny they are. But, beneath that exterior was a weeping heart for the folly of humankind and an anger toward the follies of the world. As far as the theatre is concerned, he was our great satirist—mostly of beloved institutions, but also of society itself.
Durang was a student at Harvard University during the age of the Vietnam protests. The University decided to address these on-campus protests with a pamphlet which was slipped under every dormitory door. The pamphlet was entitled, “The Nature and Purpose of the University.” Glancing at it, Durang thought he read “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe.” The idea that Harvard would put their official stance on such an existentialist idea amused him and a play emerged with that same title. As usual, it was very, very funny.
Later, he attended the Yale School of Drama with his friend Sigourney Weaver and where he was mentored by the late director/critic Robert Brustein. Durang often turned in assignments that ignored all rubric, which delighted Brustein. At Yale, Durang formed a cabaret act with Weaver called Das Lusitania Songspiel and Durang would even accompany Weaver when she hosted Saturday Night Live (and appeared as himself in a Church Chat sketch (Well, isn’t that special?). While he wasn’t particularly known as a performer, he did so sporadically through his life. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in that arena was playing the Commentator in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting it Together. A cast recording of the original production featuring his performance is available.
As for his plays, he had a rocky start in New York where theatre sizes often dwarfed his rather modest staging needs. A very funny long one-act called Titanic, which featured Weaver as a little girl stuffing lettuce up her dress amidst the biting jabs of a bickering husband and wife aboard the ill-fated ship, did well in its first small house, but as it moved Off-Broadway, it had much the same critical problems of the 1997 musical Titanic. A critic need only describe the show itself as a sinking ship (how original) and the run was cut short.
Another early play he wrote in school, ‘dentity Crisis, in which I played Robert in a production at ASFA is a perfect encapsulation of what Durang does best. In it, a clearly sane young woman has been institutionalized for being crazy while it is, in fact, her family that is in desperate need of medical attention. In the play, the character of Robert (in which I was cast) must continually change in and out of several characters (onstage, often within the same line) from being the young woman’s father, grandfather, brother, and mother’s lover. The part was daunting but, of the comic roles I played, it is the one of which I was most proud. I would call the play both side-splittingly funny and terrifying. That is the world Durang depicts: both equally tragic and comic. Sadly, comic playwrights always get short shrift in America as if what they do is somehow lower than naturalistic drama. Hence, it was rather late in life that Durang finally won the Tony for the Chekov-inspired Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, perhaps one of the few plays written since the 2010s that is both crowd-pleasing and masterfully written. This more than made up for his first foray on Broadway: a crash-and-burn turn as the librettist and lyricist for A History of the American Film, with a score by Mel Marvin. Much admired in regional productions, somehow the show didn’t land in New York, though productions appear every now and again in the heartland.
As it was, Durang’s breakthrough came with a scathing attack on his religious upbringing. The abrasive, even shocking Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (which was adapted into a television film with Diane Keaton years later) premiered in 1979, with the lovable The Actor’s Nightmare as a curtain-raiser. The play is a reunion of Sis. Mary Ignatius’ Sunday School class as adults and shows the result of an all-too common phenomenon among lapsed Catholics. Those raised in the pre-Vatican II era had orthodoxy shoved down their throats and largely rejected religion as adults. Disappointed in her students, Sis. Mary ends up murdering them to save their souls.
The 1980s were perhaps Mr. Durang’s most fertile years beginning with Beyond Therapy. While that play—a simple conceit (the doctors are crazier than the patients, with a love story front and center)—also failed in its New York premiere, but it has gone on to become a staple of regional theatres with its small cast size, short zippy scenes, and virtually no major staging requirements. In reviewing Robert Altman’s film adaptation of the play, Leonard Maltin called it “paper-thin” and perhaps there is an argument for that, but the dialogue always seems to sparkle if the overall play doesn’t have much deep to say regarding neuroticism.
That 1987 film adaptation soured Durang on working in Hollywood. While credited as a co-screenwriter, he must have been unaware that Altman used screenplays as jumping off points and often left writers feeling like second or third bananas. From my point of view, Altman’s film basically tells Durang’s play straight, but these scenes are juxtaposed with awkwardly inserted shots of nosy extras and other oddments that distract from the simple story. Altman himself, at that time, was at a low point, adapting plays for television and film and Beyond Therapy is often considered one of his worst films overall. Those people must not have seen the same year’s O. C. and Stiggs (shot in ’84 but released in ’87).
However, the 80s also saw three highly respected plays from Durang—Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Laughing Wild. Largely, Durang’s reputation rests upon these plays. They are what great comic theatre should be. One moment, your jaws on the ground and the other you can barely stay in your seat. Durang made you uncomfortable, of course, but he saw the comedy in the bleakest of life’s intricacies. Perhaps there is a comfort in knowing the abyss but also laughing at it.
The ‘90s were a mixed bag for many playwrights who dominated the ‘80s. Durang’s apparently too on-the-nose Media Amok was ridiculed at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston (no version of the play has ever been published), but his evening of one-acts Durang Durang (get it?) included razor sharp parodies of the plays of Tennessee Williams (For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, maybe the greatest parody in the history of the theatre) and Sam Shepard (A Stye of the Eye). Finally, in the 2000s, his Miss Witherspoon became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, his closest shot at being recognized for the mastery with which he wove comedy and tragedy. Durang spent the rest of his working life training playwrights at Julliard with Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman. I’m sure his students benefited from his askance view of the world and skill in navigating minefield-like subjects in his plays.
Perhaps my favorite Durang piece is a comic sketch he wrote for a Carol Burnett special. The Funeral Parlor, a vehicle for Burnett and Robin Williams, was aired twice in the special—both the version as written and a version in which Williams did his typical rapid-fire ad-libbing to try to break up everyone in the room. You can guess which version I preferred (It’s in 27 Plays—check it out).
As a friend pointed out, the world is less funny without Durang. But it also has lost a true satirist—someone who held up the mirror to our iniquities and scalded us with small doses of boiling hot water when we needed it. May he rest in peace, free from the bonds of the world that puzzled and pained him and may he bring laughter to the afterlife.
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