‘Bette and Boo’ playwright mixed high art, low humor
Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pennsylvania. He was 75.
His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Durang was found to have logopenic primary progressive aphasia, a rare form of dementia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.
An acid, impish writer, Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.
But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Anton Chekhov — there was often a strong undertone of melancholy.
Durang was also a spirited performer; he often appeared onstage and occasionally on television and in film. He originated the role of Matt in the Public Theater production of his devastating 1985 autobiographical comedy, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” and he starred as the Infant of Prague, among other roles, in his 1987 comedy “Laughing Wild,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York.
He later headlined a cabaret act, “Chris Durang and Dawne.” Dawne, his backup singers, were played by actress Sherry Anderson and writer-performer John Augustine. Augustine and Durang were married in 2014, and his husband is his only survivor.
Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born Jan. 2, 1949, in Montclair, New Jersey, the only child of Francis Ferdinand Durang Jr. and Patricia Elizabeth Durang. His father was an architect, his mother was a secretary who also managed the home. (His father’s alcoholism and his mother’s several stillbirths and periods of intense depression were childhood upheavals that Durang would translate into “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”)
His mother also gave him his first taste of theater, taking him several times a year to plays and musicals at the Paper Mill Playhouse in nearby Millburn, New Jersey. He wrote his first play, a two-page work inspired by the sitcom “I Love Lucy,” at the age of 8. His Catholic elementary school staged it. He later co-wrote two musicals, which his junior high and high school, run by Benedictine monks, put on.
At Harvard University,
Durang had his first serious experience of depression and stopped writing. But by his senior year, in a seminar with playwright and classicist William Alfred, he had returned to plays. He wrote a short script, “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe”; when it was read aloud, recalled playwright and director Emily Mann, then a fellow student, Alfred announced: “We will know who Chris Durang is. He is going to be a leading voice in American theater.”
Durang graduated from Harvard in 1971, then matriculated at the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 1974. That year, his play “The Idiots Karamazov,” written with Albert Innaurato, was performed at the Yale Repertory Theater, co-starring Meryl Streep. (Both were fellow students with him at the Yale school, as was playwright Wendy Wasserstein, another close friend.)
His breakout came in 1979, with “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” an absurdist, lacerating one-act profoundly influenced by Durang’s years in Catholic school. The play won him his first Obie Award.