Christopher Durang

Custom Made ends our 2009-2010 season with Sister Mary Explains It All to You and Actor's Nightmare. These two classic one acts by Christopher Durang well hallmark one of America's most absurd, insightful and hilarious playwrights.

Christopher Durang is an actor and playwright, best known for his satire and dark comedies. His plays often exaggerate human anger, fears and daily agonies to the absurd while still maintaining resonance and recognition. His plays have explored such themes as authoritarianism, isolation, futility, diffidence, failure and loss of ideals all while keeping his audiences laughing.

Durang was born in 1949 in Montclair New Jersey. His mother, Patricia Elizabeth, was a housewife who gave birth to a stillborn child when Durang was three. Desperately wanting a second baby, but unable to have one she flew into a depression. Her husband, Francis Ferdinand Durang, Jr., was an architect with an alcohol problem which intensified with continued failed attempts at further children. Both parents cared for Durang, but the family tension was insurmountable and when Durang was 13 his parents separated.

Patricia Elizabeth was a huge theater fan and took Durang to both local and the nearby New York shows. When her son started writing plays in elementary school she supported his work,. As he grew older she arranged venues for his plays. At Harvard Durang a depression of his own, but came out of it with a new dedication to his work and he got accepted into Yale School of Drama’s exclusive playwrighting M.F.A where he studied with such luminaries as Wendy Wasserstein and Meryl Streep. At Yale Durang’s unique comedic voice was already flourishing in such plays as When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth and The Idiots Karamazov.

In 1976 his first Off-Broadway production was his play Titanic which transferred on a double bill with Das Lusitania Songspeil, a satiric cabaret parodying Brecht and Weill co-authored and performed by Durang and fellow Yale alumnus Sigourney Weaver. The next year A History of the American Film made it to Broadway and Durang was nominated for a Tony award. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, his next play, was presented as a limited run off-off-Broadway to raves and the first of three Obie awards for its author. A year later it was remounted at Playwright’s Horizons with an opening one act called The Actor’s Nightmare. The two quickly moved off-Broadway and played for over two and a half years.

The eighties saw Durang write four of his most enduring plays: Beyond Therapy, Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Laughing Wild. Around the middle of the century Durang began to write for film. He wrote two unproduced screenplays and two produced teleplays which were performed by Jeff Daniels, Carol Burnett and Robin Williams. Durang’s acting career was similarly picking up. He was in the ensemble of his own play The Marriage of Bette and Boo and then stared in Laughing Wild. In the midst of all of this he met and started a relationship with writer John Augustine, the man he has shared his life with for the past twenty-five years. In 1989 he stared in the crackpot mock nightclub act Chris Durang and Dawne. This cabaret of lyrical rock covers and musical songs inappropriately out of context and reinterpreted became a cult hit and continued off and on into the nineties.

Durang continued as an actor and a writer on stage, in television and in film through the nineties. As an actor, his movies included The Butcher’s Wife, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter and The Cowboy Way. On television he had a recurring role on Kristin staring Kristin Chenoweth. None of his three TV pilots took off, but his plays For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and The Marriage of Bette and Boo were both hits. In 1993 he was cast alongside Julie Andrews in Stephen Sondheim’s Putting It Together, continuing a relationship with the composer’s work that had begun when Durang was an eponymous frog in Sondheim’s infamous Yale swimming pool production. In 1994 he and Marsha Norman became co-chairs of Juliard’s Playwrighting Program. To this day they have run the program which has turned out such great contemporary playwrights as David Auburn, David Lindsay-Abaire and Adam Rapp.

Durang’s work continues to challenge and amuse audiences. His recent works include the book and lyrics for the musical Adrift in Mancao, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Miss Witherspoon the latter of which was a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Other awards Durang has received include a Geggenheim, a Rockefeller, the CBS Playwrighting Fellowship and the America Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.

Further Reading:

The best and likely only stop for all questions regarding Durang is his exstensive website: www.christopherdurang.com.

The New York Times online also has archives of their original reviews of most of Christopher Durang's shows, each which give more insight into the playwright: www.nytimes.com.