Playwright Durang mastered the art of misbehaving
I’ll never forget my first encounter with the mind and work of the joltingly original Christopher Durang, who died Tuesday at 75 after a career driven by the belief that it’s a playwright’s job to make trouble, not just make audiences laugh, though he was pretty good at that too.
The year was 1981, and the place was the Westside Theatre, an off-Broadway venue where Durang’s blistering, breakthrough satire “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You,” was playing, starring Elizabeth Franz as the forbidding title character.
(Three years later, when it was presented in Boston at the Charles Playhouse, protesters picketed “Sister Mary Ignatius” outside the theater, and thenMayor Raymond L. Flynn blasted the play as “blatantly and painfully anti-Catholic.”)
Having attended St. Bridget Elementary School in Framingham, I knew a thing or two about nuns and the way some of them explained things to you. (A ruler on the knuckles was sometimes involved.)
But nothing could have prepared me for Durang’s aciddrenched portrait of Sister Mary Ignatius and her abuse of power — and, by extension, in Durang’s view, that of the Catholic Church.
In “Sister Mary Ignatius,” four ex-students, now adults, show up at a Christmas lecture Sister Mary Ignatius is delivering. One of them is gay, one is an unwed mother, one is an alcoholic, and one has had two abortions. They are determined to challenge her. By the time the play ends, violent confrontations have erupted. But Sister Mary Ignatius’s hold on power and her serene conviction that her dogma should always prevail are unshaken.
Mayor Flynn’s letter to a leader of the protests against the play when it was staged in Boston in 1984 included the assertion that “Catholic beliefs, practices and institutions are ridiculed and portrayed in cruel and bigoted stereotype.” Kevin Kelly, the Globe’s theater critic, had a different view, writing that the play had been “wrongfully perceived as being anti-Catholic” but was “really about the terrible threat of ignorance masking as authority.”
In 2001, Durang had an impact of a very different kind in Boston with “Betty’s Summer Vacation,” a darkly comic, noholds-barred lampooning of tabloid culture that was presented at the Huntington Theatre Company, in a production that starred Andrea Martin. ThenGlobe theater critic Ed Siegel called Martin’s portrayal of the cheerfully deranged Mrs. Siezmagraff “one of the most comedically inspired performances on a Boston stage in years.”
When I interviewed Martin at a coffee shop near the Prudential Center, she explained why she was drawn to the challenge of Durang’s work.
“How fantastic to have a playwright like Christopher Durang to talk about the reality of our lives in such an outrageous way,” Martin said. “Like all good theater, you’re allowed to laugh in the moment and be provoked later to think about it. I mean, this stays with you, for good or bad, and then you think about it.”
Durang wrote many plays, including “Beyond Therapy,” “Baby With the Bathwater,” “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” “Laughing Wild,” and “Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them.” Late in his career, Durang enjoyed a major success with the uproarious, Chekhov-inspired comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Premiering on Broadway in 2013 with a cast that included David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver, it won the Tony Award for best play. (Weaver, a friend and Yale School of Drama classmate of Durang’s, had starred decades earlier in his “Das Lusitania Songspiel,” a send-up of Bertolt Brecht.) In 2015, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” was presented by the Huntington.
An early champion of Durang was Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater. Durang’s first professional production was “The Idiots Karamazov,” presented at Yale Rep in 1974. A musical comedy inspired by Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” it was cowritten with Albert Innaurato (who died in 2017) and starred Meryl Streep.
When Brustein was in his 80s, during an interview in his Cambridge home, I asked him whom he considered the most interesting playwrights then working. Durang was the first name out of his mouth. It was clear that the author of the landmark “The Theatre of Revolt” admired the consistent strain of rebellion in Durang’s plays.
“He’s so naughty!” Brustein said, chuckling.
I suspect Durang wouldn’t have objected to that as his epitaph.
Durang’s career was driven by the belief that it’s a playwright’s job to make trouble.