Christopher Durang, Tony-winning playwright with acid wit, dies at 75
Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and satirist whose blending of absurdist humor, acid wit and philosophical explorations of rage, anguish, family and faith made him a mainstay of American theater for more than four decades, died April 2 at his home in Pipersville, Pa. He was 75.
The cause was complications from logopenic primary progressive aphasia, a neurodegenerative disease, said his agent, Patrick Herold. Durang was diagnosed with the condition in 2016 but continued to write, albeit slowly, for a few more years.
Although he was courteous and gentle in person, Durang was best known for plays that left audiences feeling disoriented and unsettled, marked by a brooding sense of menace or existential angst that was partly concealed by bawdy humor, surrealist gags and verbally dexterous monologues.
His work was filled with cultural references (Mick Jagger, Patty Hearst and Bertolt Brecht) and satirized theatrical forms and institutions, poking fun at traditional sitcoms, soap operas and protest plays while also lampooning priests, therapists, parents and other authority figures.
At times, he found humor in the darkest of subjects. His black comedy “Miss Witherspoon” (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, told the story of a depressed woman who dies by suicide, travels to the afterlife and refuses to be reincarnated, asking, “Why can’t I just be left alone to fester and brood in my bodiless spirit state?” He described one of his later plays, the post-9/11 satire “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them” (2009), as “a comic catharsis” after eight years of the George W. Bush administration.
“Sometimes people are offended by my plays,” he said in an interview with theater scholar Arthur Holmberg. “They have said no, no this is serious, there is no laughter involved. But I like to mix the serious with laughter. It’s a way of admitting that the stories we’re all involved in are crazy.”
Durang drew on his own Catholic school upbringing for the religious satire “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” (1979), his first commercial hit. The title character, a dogmatic nun, lectures the audience on her faith’s basic tenets before being interrupted by a group of embittered former students. Verbal sparring ensues, along with a bit of absurdist violence: When one of her ex-students reveals that he is gay, the sister shoots him dead and declares, “I’ve sent him to heaven!”
The play ran off-Broadway for more than two years, with a cast led by a comically icy Elizabeth Franz as Sister Mary. (Discovering that one of her wards has a brain tumor and is overcome with fear, she responds with impatience: “Now I thought I had explained what happens after death to you already. There is heaven, hell and purgatory. What is the problem?”)
Durang’s other notable plays included “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” (1985), an almost inconceivably buoyant comedy that was inspired by the relationship between his father, an alcoholic, and his mother, who battled depression and had multiple stillbirths. Onstage, the children’s bodies were tossed on the floor by doctors; the mother keeps a calendar recording the days in which her husband is “half drunk” or “dead drunk.”
The play demonstrated what New York Times theater critic Frank Rich described as Durang’s “special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy” and brought him his second of three off-Broadway Obie Awards.
Nearly three decades later, he won the Tony Award for best play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a darkly comic homage to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. The play premiered in 2012 and moved to Broadway the next year, with a cast that included his longtime friends Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver.
Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born in Montclair, N.J., on Jan. 2, 1949. His mother was a secretary, and his father was an architect who fought in World War II and was part of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Theyseparated when he was 13.