Groundbreaking Playwright Christopher Durang is Remembered for Throwback Thursday

April 4, 2024
HANK ORSO

A heartbroken farewell to Christopher Durang, one of the funniest of all American playwrights, who skewered sacred cows with absurdist rapiers and cleavers: marriage, Catholicism, gun craziness, our pathological addiction to being entertained. his most hallowed fellow dramatists. pic.twitter.com/Sjy7ao78zO
— Ben Brantley (@BenjBrantley) April 3, 2024

It may seem like an odd choice to have for Throwback Thursday when usually we are looking at former porn stars and scenes, or at the work of studios or directors who changed the game and set the tone at one point or another. But an absurdist playwright? Isn't that a bit erudite, a tad upper-crust, and snobbish? Not when it comes to Christopher Durang, who died Tuesday night at his home in PA. He is survived by his husband, John Augustine who he married in 2014.

Durang is known for his acid wit in his satire as he tackled literary and religious bastions like Anton Chekhov and the Catholic church, nuclear families, and psychoanalysis. Though gay, and including nods to what has become gay camp fodder, Durang never truly went the camp route; he never let his audience off that easy. He plumbed for something deeper.

His rising star as a performer and writer had him working with future megastars who, in the 70's when he started writing at Yale, were simply fellow students and friends. One of his earliest plays while he was still at Yale, The Idiots Karamazov starred a young Meryl Streep. But it's alien-battling Sigourney Weaver who would become one of his most prominent muses, always a supporter and friend.

In the 70's he and Weaver performed a lacerating cabaret act called “Das Lusitania Songspiel” that skewered German musical stalwart Bertolt Brecht with parody songs and sketches. Luckily for us, you can watch the entire performance thanks to the fan who uploaded it to YouTube (see above.) The segment mid-way through when they reimagine the film Barry Lyndon as written by Brecht, in which Weaver hangs her head limply and screams "LINE!" repeatedly will never not be funny. Durang joined Weaver in 1986 on Saturday Night Live to reenact some of this, much to the confusion of the studio audience, but theater people were delighted.

My personal memory was seeing a production of his 'Dentity Crisis and being absolutely gobsmacked at one character's monologue in which she relates attending a production of Peter Pan as a child where the audience was chastised by the character Peter for "not clapping hard enough" to save Tinkerbell, and the thereby killing the beloved fairy. It was this level of satire, his ability to be both hilariously funny and truly dark and emotional at the same time that set his writing apart. “There was a darkness to some of his plays, and there was great humanity to some of his plays,” André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater and a champion of Mr. Durang’s work since the early 1980s, said in an interview. “He was a very, very funny writer. But what he wrote about and what lay underneath those plays was quite serious.” (From The New York Times.)

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That same level of go-for-broke sensibility came with one of his more popular and vilified plays, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You from 1978 which won him his first Obie Award. It's a viciously funny one-act in which a nun teaches Catholic beliefs before berating and wreaking emotional havoc on four former students who've come for revenge. The play ends with two of them dead by Mary's gun, and a seven-year-old boy pointing the gun at a third student while reciting about God's perfection as Mary naps. This is a comedy, a very Durang comedy. Diane Keaton starred in the 2001 film version.

The elusive Tony Award would finally be Durang's for Best New Play when his Chekhov-inspired Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike was moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 2013. Starring Weaver along with Frasier star David Hyde-Pierce takes Chekhov's theme of the disconnectedness of family in his Uncle Vanya and translates them with comedic and touching flair to a contemporary country home.

After a literary career spanning over 40 years, it's with a special kind of twisted irony almost straight out of one of his plays that Durang's death was due to the effects of a rare form of dementia: logopenic primary progressive aphasia. Similar to what the actor Bruce Willis has been struggling with, it affects the ability of speech rather than memory, the ability to find words. I can only imagine the scene Durang would write if he were to create a play with this very scenario at its core.

I leave you with this intimate conversation with Durang about his work from 2016, the same year he was diagnosed.