Durang, Christopher 1949–

(Christopher Ferdinand Durang)

PERSONAL: Born January 2, 1949, in Montclair, NJ; son of Francis Ferdinand and Patricia Elizabeth Durang. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1971; Yale University, M.F.A., 1974. Religion: "Raised Roman Catholic."

ADDRESSES: Office—Creative Artists Agency, 9830 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212-1804. Agent—Helen Merrill, Helen Merrill Agency, 337 W. 22nd St., New York, NY 10011-2607.

CAREER: Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT, actor, 1974; Southern Connecticut College, New Haven, teacher of drama, 1975; Yale University, New Haven, teacher of playwriting, 1975–76; playwright, 1976–. Actor in plays, including The Idiots Karamazov and Das Lusitania Songspiel; actor in film and television, including The Secret of My Success, Joe's Apartment, Mr. North, Housesitter, The Butcher's Wife, The Cowboy Way, Penn and Teller Get Killed, and Fraiser; director of plays. Currently cochair of the playwriting program at Juilliard. Starred in a revival of Laughing Wild, produced by the Huntington Theater Company in Boston on June 16, 2005.

MEMBER: Dramatists Guild, Writers Guild, Actors Equity Association, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 1975–76; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1976–77; Guggenheim fellow, 1978–79; Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) nomination for best book of a musical, League of New York Theatres and Producers, 1978, for A History of the American Film; grant from Lecomte du Nouy Foundation, 1980–81; off-Broadway Award (Obie), Village Voice, 1980, for Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, and 1999, for Betty's Summer Vacation; Kenyon Festival Playwriting award, 1983; Hull-Warriner Award, Dramatists Guild, 1985; Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, 1994–96.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (first produced in Northampton, MA, 1971; produced in New York, NY, 1975), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1979.

Robert, first produced in Cambridge, MA, 1971; produced as 'dentity Crisis in New Haven, CT, 1975.

Better Dead Than Sorry, first produced in New Haven, CT, 1972; produced in New York, NY, 1973.

(With Albert Innaurato) I Don't Generally Like Poetry, But Have You Read "Trees"?, first produced in New Haven, CT, 1972; produced in New York, NY, 1973.

(With Albert Innaurato) The Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor; or, Gyp, first produced in New Haven, CT, 1973.

The Marriage of Betty and Boo (first produced in New Haven, CT, 1973; revised version produced in New York, NY, 1979), Dramatists Play Service, 1985.

(With Albert Innaurato) The Idiots Karamazov (first produced in New Haven at Yale Repertory Theatre, October 10, 1974), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1980.

Titanic (first produced in New Haven, CT, 1974; produced off-Broadway at Van Dam Theatre, May 10, 1976), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1983.

Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, first produced in New Haven, CT, 1975.

(With Wendy Wasserstein) When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, first produced in New Haven, CT, 1975.

(With Sigourney Weaver) Das Lusitania Songspiel, first produced off-Broadway at Van Dam Theatre, May 10, 1976.

A History of the American Film (first produced in Hartford, CT, at Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, summer, 1976; produced on Broadway at American National Theatre, March 30, 1978), Avon (New York, NY), 1978.

The Vietnamization of New Jersey (first produced in New Haven, CT, at Yale Repertory Theatre, October 1, 1976), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1978.

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (first produced in New York City at Ensemble Studio Theatre, December, 1979), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1980; adapted for film as Sister Mary Explains It All, Showtime, 2001.

The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, 'dentity Crisis: Three Short Plays, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1979.

Beyond Therapy (first produced off-Broadway at Phoenix Theatre, January 5, 1981), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1983.

The Actor's Nightmare (first produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, October 21, 1981), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1982.

Christopher Durang Explains It All for You (contains The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, 'dentity Crisis, Titanic, The Actor's Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, and Beyond Therapy,) Avon (New York, NY), 1982.

Baby with the Bathwater (first produced in Cambridge, MA, 1983; produced in New York, NY, 1983), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1984.

Sloth, first produced in Princeton, NJ, 1985.

Laughing Wild (first produced in New York, NY, 1987; revival produced in Boston, June 16, 2005), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1996.

Cardinal O'Connor [and] Woman Stand-Up, first produced as part of musical revue Urban Blight, New York, NY, 1988.

Chris Durang and Dawne (cabaret), first produced in New York, NY, 1990.

Naomi in the Living Room, first produced in New York, NY, 1991.

Media Amok, first produced in Boston, MA, 1992.

Putting It Together, first produced in New York, NY, 1993.

Shaken, Not Stirred, first produced at Fountainhead Theater in Los Angeles, CA, 1993.

For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, first produced in New York, NY, 1994.

Durang Durang (six short plays, including For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and A Stye in the Eye), first produced in New York, NY, 1994.

Twenty-seven Short Plays, Smith & Kraus (Lyme, NH), 1995.

Collected Works, Smith & Kraus (Lyme, NH), 1995.

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You; and The Actor's Nightmare: Two Plays, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1995.

Complete Full-Length Plays, Smith & Kraus (Lyme, NH), 1996.

Sex and Longing, first produced at Cort Theater, 1996.

Betty's Summer Vacation, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Wanda's Visit, first produced at Blue Heron Arts Center, New York, NY, 2001.

Monologues, edited by Erick Kraus, Smith & Kraus (Hanover, NH), 2002.

Also author, with Robert Altman, of screenplay Beyond Therapy, 1987. Writer for television series Comedy Zone and for the Carol Burnett Special. Lyricist of songs for plays.

SIDELIGHTS: Early in Christopher Durang's career, a New York Times reviewer included him in the constellation of "new American playwrights," dramatists such as Michael Cristofer, Albert Innaurato, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard who follow in the footsteps of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee. Writers like Durang, the reviewer explained, "are not one-play writers—a home run and back to the dugout—but artists with staying power and growing bodies of work."

Stylistically, Durang specializes in collegiate humor. He deals in cartoons and stereotypes, employing mechanical dialogue and brand names to exploit clichés. In his works for the stage, Durang has parodied drama, literature, movies, families, the Catholic church, show business, and society. But his lampoons are not vicious or hostile; they are controlled comedies. He "is a parodist without venom," wrote Horizonmagazine contributor Antonio Chemasi. "At the moment he fixes his pen on a target, he also falls in love with it. His work brims with an unlikely mix of acerbity and affection and at its best spills into a compassionate criticism of life."

Durang's first target as a professional playwright was literature. In 1974 the Yale Repertory Theatre produced The Idiots Karamazov, a satire of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The play, featuring Durang in a leading role, was praised by critics for its "moments of comic inspiration." "I was … impressed—with their [Durang's and coauthor Albert Innaurato's] wit as well as their scholarship," Mel Gussow stated in the New York Times. The playwright followed The Idiots Karamazov by collaborating with well-known actress Sigourney Weaver on Das Lusitania Songspiel, a musical travesty that met with critical and popular success.

Durang's major success of the 1970s was A History of the American Film, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1978. A tribute to movie mania, the play illustrates America's perceptions of Hollywood from 1930 to the present. A History of the American Film parodies some two hundred motion pictures and chronicles the evolution of movie stereotypes in American culture. There are five characters: a tough gangster typified by James Cagney, an innocent Loretta Young type, a sincere guy, a temptress, and a girl who never gets the man of her dreams. The production parodies movies such as The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca. Show girls dressed up like vegetables satirize the razzmatazz of big Hollywood productions by singing "We're in a Salad." And the character portraying Paul Henreid's role in Now, Voyager is forced to smoke two cigarettes when Bette Davis's character refuses one because she does not smoke. "In Durang's hands," wrote Time critic Gerald Clarke, "the familiar images always take an unexpected turn, however, and he proves that there is nothing so funny as a cliché of a different color."

After the success of A History of the American Film, Durang wrote two satires of suburban families: The Vietnamization of New Jersey and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, as well as a parody of the Catholic church, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Called a "savage cartoon" by Mel Gussow, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You uses the character of an elderly nun to expose the hypocrisies of Catholicism. The nun, Gussow observed, is "a self-mocking sister [who] flips pictures of hell, purgatory and heaven as if they are stops on a religious package tour." Her list of the damned includes David Bowie, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, and she lists hijacking planes alongside murder as a mortal sin. "Anyone can write an angry play—all it takes is an active spleen," observed Rich. "But only a writer of real talent can write an angry play that remains funny and controlled even in its most savage moments. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You confirms that Christopher Durang is just such a writer." The play was also adapted as a film for Show-time Television.

In October, 1981, the Obie-winning Sister Mary Ignatius was presented on the same playbill as The Actor's Nightmare, a satire of show business and the theater. Using the play-within-a-play technique for The Actor's Nightmare, Durang illustrates the comedy that ensues when an actor is forced to appear in a production he has never rehearsed. Earlier in 1981 the Phoenix Theatre produced Durang's Beyond Therapy, a parody in which a traditional woman, Prudence, and a bisexual man, Bruce, meet through a personal ad, only to have their relationship confounded by their psychiatrists. Hers is a lecherous, he-man Freudian; his is an absent-minded comforter. "Some of Durang's satire … is sidesplitting," commented a New York reviewer, "and there are many magisterial digs at our general mores, amores, and immores."

A writer heaped with honors early in his career may begin to feel the weight of the mantle later on. Daily News reviewer Douglas Watt wrote of Durang's 1983 drama, Baby with the Bathwater, Durang "continues to write like a fiendishly clever undergrad with some fresh slants but an inability to make them coalesce into a fully sustained evening of theater." Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, commented: "We can't ignore that Act I of Baby with the Bathwater is a strained variation on past Durang riffs. We're so inured by now to this writer's angry view of parental authority figures that at intermission we feel like shaking him and shouting: 'Enough already! Move on!'" New York Magazine contributor John Simon sounded a similar theme: "Christopher Durang is such a funny fellow that his plays cannot help being funny; now, if they could only help being so undisciplined…. Free-floating satire and rampant absurdism are all very well, but even the wildest play must let its characters grow in wildness and match up mouth with jokes." But Nation reviewer Eliot Sirkin stated that Durang "is, at heart, a writer who divides humanity into the humiliators and the humiliated." Sirkin compared Durang's methods to those of Tennessee Williams: "When Williams created an overwhelming woman, he didn't create a psychopathic fiend—at least not always…. Durang's witches are just witches."

Durang's next play, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, draws from the playwright's own childhood. New York Post reviewer Clive Barnes summarized the characters: "The father was a drunk, the mother rendered an emotional cripple largely by her tragic succession of stillborn children, the grandparents were certifiably nutty, the family background stained with the oppression of the Roman Catholic Church, and the son himself is primarily absorbed in a scholarly enquiry into the novels of Thomas Hardy. Just plain folks!" New York Times critic Frank Rich explained, "Bette and Boo is sporadically funny and has been conceived with a structural inventiveness new to the writer's work…. But at the same time, Mr. Durang's jokemaking is becoming more mannered and repetitive…. Bette and Boohas a strangely airless atmosphere." New York Magazine critic John Simon wrote, "Christopher Durang's latest, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, is more recycling than writing. Here again, the quasi-autobiographical boy-hero growing up absurd." A Contemporary Dramatists writer was more complimentary about this play, calling The Marriage of Bette and Boo "a trenchantly amusing dissection of the contemporary Catholic family…. The playwright gives an outrageously satiric view of society that characterizes his best work."

In a 1990 Chicago Tribune interview with Richard Christiansen, Durang revealed that he felt "burned out on New York, and that includes its theater." For a time Durang left the theater to tour with a one-hour cabaret act, Chris Durang and Dawne. Durang explained his "premise" to Christiansen: "I was fed up with being a playwright and had decided to form my own lounge act with two back-up singers and go on a tour of Ramada Inns across the country."

In 1992 Durang returned to the theater with Media Amok, a lampoon of the characters and obsessions of television talk shows. Noting its content, Durang told Boston Globe critic Kevin Kelly that he had become "more political." The play features an elderly couple watching television talk shows which assault them constantly with the same three topics: abortion, gay rights, and racial tension. All of the topics are handled in a flippant and inflammatory fashion.

In 1994 Durang Durang, a series of six sketches taking swipes at fellow playwrights Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and David Mamet, debuted in New York City. One section, the one-act play titled For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, is a parody of The Glass Menagerie, while A Stye in the Eye focuses on Shepard's typical cowboy characters. In a New Yorker review, Nancy Franklin called the play "Beckett with a joy buzzer…. Sitting through Durang Durang is a little like going on the bumper cars at an amusement park: you're so caught up in the exhilarating hysteria that it doesn't matter to you that you're not actually going anywhere except—momentarily, blissfully—outside yourself." In a New York Times review, Ben Brantley described Durang Durang as "endearing and exasperating … juvenile and predictable."

Lulu, a nymphomaniac, and Justin, a nearly as insatiable homosexual, share an apartment in the play Sex and Longing. A philandering and drunkard senator and his puritanical wife, as well as a reverend from the political right, also figure into the plot. Newsweek critic Marc Peyser remarked: "This intersection of sex, religion, hypocrisy and spiritual emptiness was bracing two decades ago … now it's trite and labored and, worst of all, almost devoid of humor." New York critic John Simon, who thought the play's humorlessness stems from its silliness bordering on the ridiculous, wrote that the play "is strictly anti-realistic absurdist farce, but even as such it ought to know where it is going…. It is all rather like automatic writing with a glitch in the automation." Variety contributor Greg Evans noted that Durang "can mine any laughs at all from such perversity," noting that the "characters [are] so broadly drawn that to call them stereotypes would be an understatement." Still, Evans observed, "Despite his misstep here, the playwright retains a distinctive voice—one that finds its way even through the indulgences of this play."

Durang's 1999 effort, Betty's Summer Vacation, is "a summer sandstorm of horrifying fun," according to Everett Evans in the Houston Chronicle. The critic explained, "Sensible, normal Betty has come to a seaside 'summer share' with a simple wish for rest and quiet. As soon as we meet the fellow tenants to which fate has subjected her, we realize this is to be a comedy of excruciating frustration." These characters include a very talkative victim of childhood incest, a serial killer, and a flasher. Steven Winn, reviewing a local production of the play for the San Francisco Chronicle, mentioned the chorus of voices that Durang included in the script. "These offstage voices are the American public," wrote Winn, and "the whole thing's a kind of tabloid catharsis, like waking up from a bad dream and finding yourself in the studio audience of The Jerry Springer Show." As Holly Hildebrand explained in Back Stage West, "Who better to take a poke—not to mention quite a number of stabs—at this bizarre entertainment business than Durang, who's never shrunk from satirizing American society and culture." Durang premiered a briefer effort, Wanda's Visit, in 2001. Laura Weinert, also reviewing for Back Stage West, summed it up as "the lighter side of Durang, an uproarious glimpse at what happens when the world of tired, static marrieds Marsha and Jim is upset by a surprise knock on the door by Jim's high school sweetheart Wanda."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

American Theatre Annual, 1979–1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 27, 1984, Volume 38, 1986.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, April 27, 1999, Don Shewey, review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. 79.

American Theatre, December, 1999, Christopher Du-rang, "An Interview with the Playwright by Himself," review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. 37.

Atlanta Constitution, March 18, 1994, p. P17.

Back Stage West, April 7, 2000, Karl Levett, "Durang, Durang and More Durang," p. 42; July 27, 2000, Brad Schreiber, review of The Marriage of Bette and Boo, p. 18; February 15, 2001, Madeleine Shaner, review of Baby with the Bathwater, p. 13; May 24, 2001, Holly Hildebrand, "Durang Delivers," p. 11; August 15, 2002, Kristina Mannion, "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe at the Empire Theater," p. 23; September 19, 2002, Laura Weinert, "Durang, Make It a Double! at the Complex," p. 13, and Gi-Gi Downs, "Beyond Therapy at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage," p. 13.

Boston Globe, March 22, 1992, p. B25.

Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1990.

Daily News (New York, NY), March 31, 1978; November 9, 1983.

Entertainment Weekly, April 16, 1993, p. 31.

Horizon, March, 1978.

Houston Chronicle, May 7, 2001, Everett Evans, "Pack Your Bags for Comic Betty's Summer Vacation," p. 5.

Library Journal, August, 1997, Howard E. Miller, "Complete Full-Length Plays," p. 86.

Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1989, p. 8; November 25, 1994, p. 1.

Nation, April 15, 1978; February 18, 1984, pp. 202-204.

New Leader, October 7, 1996, Stefan Kanfer, review of Sex and Longing, p. 23.

New Republic, April 22, 1978.

Newsweek, April 10, 1978; October 21, 1996, Marc Peyser, review of Sex and Longing, p. 89.

New York, April 17, 1978; January 19, 1981; October 23, 1989, p. 166; November 28, 1994, p. 76; October 21, 1996, pp. 76-77; March 29, 1999, John Si mon, review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. 46.

New Yorker, May 24, 1976; April 10, 1978; January 19, 1981; November 28, 1994, pp. 153-55.

New York Magazine, November 21, 1983, pp. 65-68; June 3, 1985, pp. 83-84.

New York Post, March 31, 1978; November 9, 1983; December 12, 1983, p. 80; May 17, 1985, pp. 268-269.

New York Times, November 11, 1974; February 13, 1977; March 17, 1977; May 11, 1977; August 21, 1977; June 23, 1978; December 27, 1978; February 24, 1979; December 21, 1979; February 8, 1980; August 6, 1980; January 6, 1981; October 22, 1981; November 9, 1983, p. C21; May 17, 1985, p. 3; June 27, 1994, p. C13; November 14, 1994, p. 11; March 14, 1999, Bob Morris, review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. AR7; March 15, 1999, Ben Brantley, review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. E1; January 15, 2001, Sarah Boxer, review of The Idiots Karamazov, p. B9; May 25, 2001, Caryn James, review of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, p. E23.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2001, Steven Winn, "Vacation Feeds on Craving for Sex and Gore; Actors Theatre Takes on Durang's Biting Satire," p. B5.

Saturday Review, May 27, 1978.

Time, May 23, 1977.

USA Today, May 17, 1985.

Variety, November 14, 1994, p. 54; October 14-20, 1996, p. 72; March 22, 1999, Charles Isherwood, review of Betty's Summer Vacation, p. 46; May 28, 2001, Steven Oxman, review of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, p. 29.

Washington Post, December 11, 1994, p. 4.

Women's Wear Daily, May 20, 1985.

World Literature Today, summer, 1991, p. 487.

ONLINE

Moonstruck Web site, http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/ (May 1, 2003), author profile.