Christopher Durang

My first time laughing at dialogue written by Christopher Durang was in a high school classroom on a crack-of-dawn early Saturday morning during a Speech & Debate tournament.? The category was Humorous Interpretation, and the play was The Vietnamization of New Jersey, a viciously hilarious satire of those “Davey’s coming home from the war” plays that proliferated the theatre in the early 70s after Vietnam.? The play was lightning fast and the jokes were both vulgar and deeply humane.? I had never heard of this “Durang” dude, but wrote his name on a piece of paper just before I stood up to perform my piece, praying I could land one or two laughs, let alone the 87 laughs I had just experienced watching the Durang.

In the next round of the tournament, ANOTHER performer rose to perform ANOTHER hilarious play called Titanic, a one-act about the horrible people and the inept crew of the infamous ocean liner (this was way before the Oscar-winning film and the Broadway musical); this piece had a particularly crazy character named Lydia, the ship captain’s daughter who plopped herself down at guests’ dinner tables and terrorized them.? I was rolling with laughter this time around, both by the performer and the apparent glee in the writing to be both absolutely shocking and humanly true.

Of course, it was another play by Christopher Durang.

When the sad news that Durang had died last week was announced, my social media was scattered with posts and photos from the many college productions of his plays and testimonies as to what a bold and transformative voice he was in each of each performer’s life. ? Everyone I knew seemed to have encountered and fell in love with Durang’s work as a young person, just as he remained an elfin, snarky writer throughout his prestigious Tony-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated career - yet with the savage bite of a truth teller and cruel satirist.? He gave you permission to thumb your nose at the higher-ups, even if you might eventually become one yourself.

After that tournament, I dove right into his work, reading everything I could get my hands on, especially the two essential volumes of his collected works , published by Smith and Kraus. The plays - Marriage of Bette and Boo, Baby With the Bathwater, Beyond Therapy, Laughing Wild, The Actor’s Nightmare - were all brilliantly structured and full of hilarity.? But it was in the Author’s Notes introducing each work where I fully encountered a version of Christopher Durang who was very frank about the winding, complicated road that a play goes through to make it to the stage.? These essays are wisely blunt about the difficulty and challenge of writing plays and serve as almost a craft memoir - essential reading for anyone looking to make a writing life in the theater.

Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You is perhaps THE gateway play for many of his fans - and was a hugely controversial project.? In the play, a venerated Catholic nun delivers a lecture about the tribulations and challenges in the modern world (circa the early 80s when the play was written) and applies Catholic dogma to every situation, with increasingly absurd and hilarious rationalizations.? Suddenly a few of her former students (now adults) return to confront her about the ramifications of her iron-willed teaching.? The play was met with protests and government arts council hearings across the country for nearly half a decade - all of which Durang catalogues in the introduction and afterward on the play.? How a work of art impacts a community is just as important as getting it up in the first place.? Both requires the writer to stand guard and be responsible, which Durang most certainly shows by example.

He’s also warm and thankful and grateful in these essays to the ever-growing community of actors, directors, and mentors that contributed to his world along the way - not to mention his fellow writers.? Early in my deep dive on Durang, I found a photo of him and Wendy Wasserstein, his fellow classmate at Yale and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Heidi Chronicles , sitting by the fountain in Lincoln Center Plaza in the late 1980s.? I saved the photo to remind me of the important of comrades in the making of great and lasting stories, of showing up for each other when we are needed, for learning to rely and support each other as we make our art.? It feels more essential than ever in these dark and isolated times to be together and experience art together.? ?

As a young writer, I was lucky enough to meet both Wasserstein and Durang in different contexts.? And while Wendy threw her arms around me when I made her laugh her gloriously full laugh, Durang was a bit more leery.? He was having a sort-of creative renaissance, with successes like Betty’s Summer Vacation and Miss Witherspoon - and his Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike yet to come.? No doubt, he had encountered hundreds of young writers like me who wanted to learn the secrets of how to be hilarious and sharp, to create tremendously joyous characters for actors to perform, and yet build each play with the iron structure of a farce.? How did he do it, over and over again?? Instead of asking him all the Great Questions of the World, I attempted to make him laugh. Kindly, he told me that he appreciated me for trying.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself missing Durang’s voice.? What would he make of these confusing and increasingly insane times?? How would his characters have weathered the pandemic, the masks, the hand sanitizer, the irresponsible messaging about drinking bleach?? While the brilliant Tony Kushner has shared plans to write a play about Donald Trump , I would much prefer Christopher Durang’s version of that play.? His work lets no one off the hook in our selfish absurdity, our hypocrisy, and our ridiculously cruel desires.? Perhaps the howling laughter inspired by his writing would bring us all together in a shared communal experience - before breaking us apart again for the next protest over the next battle over the next indignity.

Christopher Durang showed us through his work and his teaching (he was also the founding co-chair of the playwriting program at Juiliard for decades and also an occasional actor) how opposing realities could both be true - that one could conjure up a version of society that pushes us to the extremes of our sanity while at the same time caring deeply about building connections and understanding through that extremity.? By pushing characters to their breaking point, he reveals our deepest vulnerabilities, our darkest secrets, our biggest fears.

Coming together to share those with each other might be the greatest tribute to him.

RIP, good sir.