Family Survival

Arthur Holmberg: Of all your plays Bette and Boo is your favorite. Why?

Christopher Durang: Since it’s based on my parents, it’s more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them. My family argued a lot. One of my impulses in writing is to take people’s crazy behavior and try to make order of what sometimes feels chaotic in the past.

AH: You once said it was a way of taming the past. What do you mean?

CD: When you are in the midst of a specific incident in your family, it’s upsetting. By putting it into a play, you clarify it. All of this convoluted interaction between people is taken out of my brain and put into an understandable form on the stage, and I feel like it’s out of my brain and handled. I don’t know how to be more specific than that.

AH: Like Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, looking for integritas, consonantia, claritas.

CD: Yeah, seeing connections between things.

AH: In another interview you said that laughter is a healing process. Please explain.

CD: Usually you cannot laugh if you are in a bad mood or in the throes of a problem that seems like the most serious problem in the world. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother fought with him when he was drunk, which was not necessarily the best way to confront the problem. Late in the play, Bette finally gets a divorce from Boo. She drags out all her calenders on which throughout the years of their marriage she had marked on certain days DD for dead drunk and HD for half drunk. She was refreshing her memory for the divorce proceedings. I was with her, and she was saying, oh look at this, he was dead drunk here and half drunk here, and then I looked at her funny, and we both laughed at the craziness of putting DD and HD on the calendar for years at a time. It was the beginning of perspective. When she was doing it, she did not have any perspective. She was just angry. But as the years passed, suddenly it struck her as a foolish and futile thing to have done. It meant a new understanding that nagging my father was not the best way to help him. Laughter can bring a new perspective. Sometimes people are offended by my plays. 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.

AH: Do audiences find your mixture of the comic and the serious disconcerting?

CD: In Bette and Boo, Bette loses three children to still-birth.

AH: Three? I thought it was four.

CD: You’re right it is four. In life my mother lost three. I added one for…

AH: comic effect…

CD: for dramatic effect. I present the deaths of the babies by having the doctor come out saying the baby is dead and then dropping the baby on the ground. When done properly, it’s funny. I also thought that it’s obviously so sad that to have a realistic scene in which someone comes out and says your baby’s dead takes you into the realm of a T.V. movie. I wasn’t writing a realist play about how to deal with the death of a baby. But there was something about the way I wrote that play that the audience got that I meant them to feel sympathy for Bette, even though I presented it somewhat surrealistically. So I became more aware of wanting to cue the audience in about where there was genuine emotion.

AH: Can you give me an example of a cue in Bette and Boo?

CD: It isn’t in the element of the babies, it’s how Bette is treated other places; for instance, the scene in which Bette talks on the phone in the middle of the night to her friend Bonnie. There’s a bit of humor in that scene, but basically it isn’t funny. It communicates how sad Bette feels about the deaths of the children. And so, I think the audience absolutely knows that they are meant to feel empathy for her. You don’t know during the first scene when the baby is dropped, and now I am getting to the nitty gritty of it. The first time this happens, it’s Skippy, who goes on to live. So the first time you’re shocked, and you laugh, and you’re let off the hook because it isn’t a real death, it’s a misunderstanding. Now I did not do this consciously, I just wrote it. The second time, you think, oh God, they’re doing it again. But it turns out this baby’s really dead. And in the next scene Emily has a break down and Bette goes into catatonia. Again, the scene that follows communicates sympathy, that we are not just finding these people funny. That’s what I mean by cueing the audience, making the shift in tones clear.

AH: In exasperation, the priest exclaims, “Why did God make people so stupid, why don’t they think before they get married.”

CD: My parents didn’t really know one another. My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don’t think that they actually got to know one another deeply. So Father Donnally makes a point when he says people come to me with problems when it is too late, once you’re already married and have children. So that is a frustration I let him express. What can you say to these couples who are in such a mess? Because even if you could recommend divorce, if young children are involved, that is not a cure-all. But divorce can sometimes be the better thing to do. When my parents separated, I was very grateful.

AH: Grateful?

CD: Oh, God, yes. They argued too much. It was hellish being around them. I never knew when they were going to explode into screaming.

AH: You have frequently stated that you’re against authoritarian dogmas. Bette and Boo got married in the late 40s, and both of them accept the fascistic gender roles their culture promulgates. But neither fits easily into those rigid stereotypes. For instance, Boo neither can nor wants to play the brutal patriarch we see in his father, yet the wife communicates to him in a destructive way how disappointed she is that he’s not omnipotent and not successful enough for her. And she doesn’t get what she wants out of the marriage: emotional intimacy and a big brood. She cannot be the happy homemaker. When their marriage doesn’t conform to their expectations, neither one can deal with the reality of their relationship.

CD: Those questions are very complicated. Let me try to address them. I do not view this play as an attack on marriage or the nuclear family. In Chekhov everyone falls in love with the wrong person, yet I don’t think Chekhov is saying let’s do away with love. He’s saying, isn’t this sad…this is the way things are.

AH: And funny.

CD: Yeah, theoretically funny. So my play is about the pain that exists in the nuclear family, but I am mostly writing about psychology. I am actually very drawn to the way you described Bette and Boo, talking about their gender roles. I thought it was a very accurate description of the play, but I’m not a writer who sits down and says, okay, now I’m going to write about gender roles. I don’t think that way. I think, oh, I’m going to write a story about these characters, and they do this and talk this way. The way you described Bette’s disappointment that Boo isn’t more of a patriarch is very interesting. What you say about gender roles in the play is apt, but I picked it up unconsciously. I didn’t feel I was making a generalized comment about marriage beyond saying that when people are bound together and have large incompatibilities, it makes for a great deal of unhappiness. But when I was growing up, I really didn’t know any marriages that seemed to me happy.

AH: You once said that the women in your family were very strong and to have a disagreement with one of them was like arm wrestling. How do you see the women in this play as strong?

CD: When I say strong I partially mean obstinate. Also, the women were very vibrant; they were lively but also had a strong force of will. My mother and aunt are the most talkative females I have ever met. If you tried to argue with them, they would bury you with words. I am quite verbal, too, so I was a stronger match for my mother than my father was. My father would get overwhelmed and disappear.

AH: We get to know the women in this play much better than the men. Skippy, the son, doesn’t have any positive male role models. His father doesn’t know how to talk to him and withdraws. The maternal grandfather has been reduced by a stroke to a blathering idiot; the paternal grandfather is a militant misogynist, constantly putting women down. Although you show us the absurd side of Bette, you also go to great lengths to humanize her so that we feel sorry for her. Emotionally, the play puts us on the side of the females, who are fleshed out with more psychological details than the men.

CD: I don’t have an answer. I knew my father less than I knew my mother, so the details I ended up giving came more naturally about Bette than Boo. I don’t know what else to say.

AH: Doesn’t Boo say at one point to Bette, I don’t want any more kids.

CD: Yeah, and, truthfully, I always envisioned it as a sad thing to say. He goes on to say that kids wake you up in the middle of the night dead. Obviously, that is a way of saying he feels sad that we have had all these children who have died. In the last several years, I have gotten to know some of my father’s family more than I did. I was thirteen when my parents separated, and we actually stopped dealing with that side of the family. I do regret that I didn’t get to know my father. For instance, he fought in WW II and was part of the D-day invasion on Normandy Beach. But it wasn’t something he talked much about. Now that he is dead, I am so regretful that my mother and I looked at him not as a human being but as this problem and how do we get this problem to stop drinking. So I never really had a conversation, saying what did you do in the war, daddy. And I regret that. One of his sisters sent me a letter that he had written to his father shortly after the D-day invasion. He was actually articulate in the letter. It sounded scary, it would be scary, and it was an interesting view into him. There were a couple of paragraphs crossed out by the government about, I guess, troop movements and military stuff like that. S o it was kind of odd, but I wondered what he had written in those crossed-out paragraphs. That part of my father I am sorry I did not know, so I think that element of not knowing my father is what you are picking up in the play.

AH: I saw the original production at the Public Theater with Joan Allen, Mercedes Ruehl, and Olympia Dukakis. The last scene caught me completely off-guard. I was not prepared for such an emotional reaction when the father and son visit the mother in the hospital. Your play moves towards a powerful catharsis – they finally talk to each other and seem to enjoy each other’s company. It’s fun seeing the family reunited again.

CD: When we rehearsed it with Jerry Zaks, who directed it, he said in this scene Bette and Boo finally speak to each other with an ease they have not shown before. It’s very nice, but it’s also sad. Why couldn’t they have found that earlier? But maybe now Bette, having been divorced, was no longer committed to changing him and actually accepting him with whatever flaws he had. In many of the other scenes, she keeps saying you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, you’ve got to change. My parents actually did love one another on some level and cared for one another too. Jerry told us not to play sadness.

AH: It’s a happy scene, but also sad because you realize they could have succeeded in thier marriage.

CD: That’s true.

AH: And when your father turns to you and says, we are so glad we had you, Skippy, it detonates like Mary Tyrone’s, “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

CD: Plays can be mysterious. Olympia Dukakis played Soot, and once, late in rehearsals, she said this is a very forgiving play. And I remember thinking that that sounded right. I had not thought it because as you’re sitting through the play….

AH: It’s so unrelenting….

CD: Yeah… you don’t feel like this is all about forgiveness, so it’s something surprising about this scene. I acted the part of Skippy at the Public. In the first preview, I was startled by how much emotion I felt at the end of the play. I hadn’t felt it in rehearsal, and I was thrown by it. That happened often in the last scene. The play never sent me home depressed. I actually left with a nice feeling about Bette and Boo.

Arthur Holmberg is the Literary Director of the A.R.T.