Poison Pen

I have been reading and watching Christopher Durang’s plays for over twenty-five years now, ever since he entered the playwriting program of the Yale School of Drama in the early seventies when I was Dean. I write this less in the role of Artistic Director or critic than of proud parent.

Durang was a member of a now legendary class, many of whose members not only performed, directed, and designed his work at the School and the Yale Rep, but were to be his regular collaborators for many years to come. He is a famously loyal friend, but also someone who is stimulated by talents compatible with his own.

In a sense, Durang set the tone for this witty and brilliant, sometimes acerbic, sometimes disaffected generation. I once described him as an angelic altar boy with poison leeching through his writing fingers, which was my clumsy way of saying that behind his shy and courteous demeanor lurks a literary Jack the Ripper. I have recently come to realize that this characterization is only marginally true. There is a great deal of anger in his work, all right, often proceeding from genuine pain and wounded innocence. But except on rare occasions – when a demon leaps out of his skin and starts pitchforking some fatuous damned soul – Chris is much too kindhearted to go for the jugular.

It’s probably more accurate to describe him as a Catholic lapsarian, troubled over the meaninglessness of life and heartsick over the absence of God – when he is not being dumbstruck by His malevolence and delinquency. Durang’s surrogate Matt says it best in The Marriage of Bette and Boo: “I don’t think God punishes people for specific things. . . . I think he punishes people in general, for no reason.” This has a Doestoyevskian ring, doesn’t it? I’ve always suspected Durang of being the reincarnation of Ivan Karamazov, assuming Dostoyevsky’s heterodox character had been reborn in New Jersey, educated at Harvard, and forced to achieve his liberal arts baccalaureate by wading knee deep through the swamps of American pop culture.

Christopher Durang’s unwashed brain is an uneasy compound of Hollywood movies and sit-coms, Eugene Ionesco plays and Monty Python skits. Like Ionesco, Durang certainly knows how many crimes are committed in the name of language. (I adore the female analyst in Beyond Therapy who for the life of her can’t remember the word for “Porpoise. Pompous. Pom Pom. Paparazzi. Polyester. Pollywog. Olley olley oxen free. Patient. I’m sorry, I mean patient.”) It was Ionesco who told us that philology always leads to calamity. For Durang calamity is more often the result of stupidity. Sudden explosions of fury, followed by an overwhelming sense of relief, this seems to be the trademark behavior not only of the playwright’s characters but of us who watch them. Perhaps of everybody.

Durang began his writing life as a parodist. In The Idiots Karamazov (co-authored with his classmate, Albert Inaurato), he turned his mocking eyes on the whole corpus of Russian and American literature, fashioning the revenge of an innocent undergraduate who, having had Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Dickens, Anais Nin, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Eugene O’Neill force fed him for four years, regurgitated them in the form of demented Cliff Notes. The four Karamazov Brothers transform into the Three Sisters (with a touch of the four Marx Brothers), Alyosha turns into Pip, Constance Garnett into Miss Havisham, and Mrs. Karamazov becomes Mary Tyrone. It was the first full-length Durang I ever read, and it still makes me laugh out loud.

I shall never forget the two Yale productions of The Idiots Karamazov. Both featured the divine Meryl Streep, a wart on her nose, her eyes oozing gum, playing the “ancient translatrix” Con-stance Garnett, bane of all lovers of Russian literature. Brandishing her cane and fixing us all with a baleful scowl, she concluded the action by circling the stage in her wheelchair, screaming at the audience “Go home! GO HOME!” Lying in ruins on stage was the detritus of Western literature, having been jammed into some crazy blender which spewed it out as pulp and seeds.

It was assumed at this time that Durang’s greatest talent was for satiric cabarets. And, indeed, in his next play, The Vietnamization of New Jersey, he ridiculed the anti-war plays of the age, particularly Sticks and Bones by the hugely gifted but (at the time) overly conscience-stricken David Rabe. The poster we made for the Yale production was a sardonic variant on the famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner painting, this time featuring a family you wouldn’t dream of taking home with you, much less share a drumstick with. Skewering right-wing warmongers and leftwing guiltmongers alike, like Lenny Bruce before him, Durang managed to make comedy out of the unthinkable and the unspeakable. The play showed a brave, outspoken generation beginning to find its voice – before political correctness gave it laryngitis by shoving a big turkey bone down its throat.

Durang’s preoccupation with dead babies (they first appear in American Film) becomes an obsession in what is clearly his finest play to date, the thinly disguised autobiographical drama The Marriage of Bette and Boo. In this play, Durang reveals himself as another child of O’Neill, entering the action as a character (he also entered the first production as an actor) in much the same way O’Neill did in Long Day’s Journey and for much the same reasons. “Unless you go through all the genuine anger you feel, both justified and unjustified,” Durang wrote in his poignant introduction to the play, “the feelings of love that you do have will not have any legitimate base. . . . Plus, eventually you will go crazy.” The Marriage of Bette and Boo is a touching tribute to a recently dead mother, to an alcoholic father, and to a son who has finally learned to forgive his family and himself.

Baby with the Bathwater, which also deals with dead or abused children, is another comedy about a dysfunctional family, an emphasis which led one of Durang’s critics (Benedict Nightingale) to accuse him and other American dramatists of writing “diaper plays.” (An even more overworked and wrongheaded epithet for Durang is “sophomoric.”) But if Durang writes diaper plays, so did O’Neill, Odets, Miller, Albee, and Williams. Indeed, the quintessential American drama is and always has been a family drama – a work in which the writer lays his ghosts to rest at last, making peace with his past by exorcising the dead.

Chris is kind enough to mention in the preface to his collected plays that I have always been a supporter of his work. Well, it is true I recognized that each of his plays had special genius, if not necessarily equal value. And thank God I did! Otherwise I might have found myself in them. There is nothing that so damns a producer (or a critic) to the lowest circle of a satirist’s hell than failing to recognize a genuine talent. Talent is not wanting in the plays of Chris Durang, which are the product of a brilliant and daring dramatic mind at work. And they make me very, very proud.

Robert Brustein is the Artistic Director of the A.R.T.