The playwright who lampooned American life
Christopher Durang’s plays always provoked a strong reaction—but whether it was laughter, tears, or outrage depended on the audience. His 1979 satire Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You ruthlessly skewered his doctrinaire Catholic upbringing, in a tale that starts with a school lecture and ends in bloodshed. The play won an Obie Award when it appeared off-Broadway but was protested elsewhere: then–Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn called it “blatantly and painfully anti-Catholic.” But Durang aimed his satirical barbs far beyond the church, parodying revered playwrights such as Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams in comedies about marriage, psychiatry, middle age, and simple human folly. “My sense of humor,” he said in 1999, “asks for a complicated response.”
Born in Montclair, N.J., Durang was the only child of an architect and a secretary whose struggles with alcoholism, stillbirth, and depression inspired his 1985 play The Marriage of Bette and Boo. He enjoyed “a celebrated student career” at Harvard University and the Yale School of Drama, said Deadline. In 1974, the year he finished grad school, his play The Idiots Karamazov was produced at Yale Repertory Theater starring fellow student Meryl Streep. But he found he “couldn’t easily replicate” the success of Sister Mary Ignatius, said The New York Times.
His follow-up, 1982’s Beyond Therapy, reached Broadway starring Dianne Wiest, John Lithgow, and David Hyde Pierce, but he disavowed Robert Altman’s widely panned film version, calling the project “a very unhappy experience.”
Yet Durang “improved with age,” said The Washington Post. His work “got looser, more radical and angry,” as he found improbable humor in suicide (2006’s Miss Witherspoon) and the War on Terror (2009’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them). His absurdist Chekhov spoof Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike won the 2013 Tony for Best Play—“a rare instance when the prize went to a comedy.” And two years after being diagnosed with a rare form of dementia, he threw in one last salvo at America’s gun culture in 2018’s Turning Off the Morning News. “Sometimes people are offended by my plays,” he said. “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.”