We Want to Be… ANARCHY!

Reading The Brothers Karamazov in high school, Christopher Durang was amused by the seeming impossibility of turning the weighty Russian novel into a film. Hollywood had produced a debacle staring Yul Brynner, William Shatner, and Maria Schell, who played Grushenka despite Marilyn Monroe’s trumpeting to the press her urge to act the part. With his 8mm camera, Durang filmed his own adaptation using New Jersey actors and monks’ robes borrowed from his Catholic high school.

Years later at the Yale School of Drama, Durang showed what he calls his “crackpot movie” to fellow playwriting student Albert Innaurato. A kindred anarchist who shared Durang’s obsession with nuns and priests, Innaurato suggested co-writing an adaptation as a play with music, which would underline, as parody, the difficulties of dramatizing Dostoevsky’s philosophical discussions. Hired to direct Yale undergraduates, Innaurato substituted their send-up of the western canon for a scheduled production of Hedda Gabler.

Parody, a genre Durang returned to in such later plays as Ubu Lear, A History of the American Film, and Desire, Desire, Desire is a device the author uses to appreciate rather than ridicule the targeted authors. “I’m glad many critics of For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls referred to it as a ‘fond parody’ of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Occasionally parody can be mean-spirited. But I like most of the works I’ve parodied,” says Durang.

Christopher Durang and Charles Levin in the 1974 Yale Repertory Theatre production of The Idiots Karamazov.Similarly, Innaurato understands their conspiracy as a compliment. Innaurato, who speaks fluent Russian, even attributes an element of parody to Dostoevsky’s original. “I think that Dostoevsky, like any great artist, was an anarchist. There’s an element of parody in the novel itself. Specially in the Grand Inquisitor scene. Constance Garnett, the translator, missed the density of Dostoevsky’s grotesque humor. Pushkin was not altogether straightforward either. I can’t look at Eugene Onegin except as parody.”

The 1973 premiere of The Brothers Karamazov (as it was titled for the Yale undergraduate production) earned Durang and Innaurato a reputation for perversity. In their ideal cast, Constance Garnett, the lunatic translator of Russian who can’t keep her private life out of her translations, would be played by Dame Edith Evans. So that is what they advertised around campus. Excited by the appearance of the famous British actress, a Yale professor encouraged all his students to attend. But at the beginning of each performance, it was announced that Dame Edith had broken her hip, and Albert Innaurato would have to go on in her place. “I put on a lady’s garden hat and veil, which was transvestitism as far as they were concerned,” remembers Innaurato. “We were like ‘South Park’ in a world where people were expecting Ozzie and Harriet. The Yale undergraduate theatres performed standard productions of Shakespeare and musical comedies. The cross-gender casting in our production was radical. I made the house jock dress up as a ballerina and sing Puccini at Anaïs Nin’s soirée. The jocks, not to mention the dean of the college, flipped out. A riot broke out after the performance.”

Karamazov was their first, but not their last, scandal at Yale. Later that year, they accepted an invitation to perform for the ladies’ committee at the Yale Art Gallery. They began their performance by dressing up as priests and playing Laura and Amanda from The Glass Menagerie. If that was not enough to ruffle feathers, the duo followed that act with a mock mass to the tune “Cabaret.” “The audience wanted to lynch us,” recalls Innaurato. “They booed. And then they wrote a letter to Howard Stein, head of the School of Drama, and Bob Brustein, head of the Yale Rep, saying that we didn’t belong at Yale.”

Though threatened with expulsion from the university, Innaurato appreciated the shock of the performance. He follows Baudelaire’s dictum, “Il faut épater les bourgeoisie.” (“It’s necessary to shock the bourgeoisie.”) The value of many of his plays, he believes, lies in their offensiveness. “The hilarity of the original 1977 production of my play Gemini came from anxiety. There has to be an insane impulse in a comedy, and it has to build on an audience’s fear. Both Chris and I have made people laugh by making them anxious. I don’t know how easy it is to do anymore. I haven’t seen anything offensive in New York for twenty years.”

While Yale deans were threatening to cut off financial aid to the “pervert playwrights,” Howard Stein, one of the few audience members who had laughed during the undergraduate production, was scheduling a Yale School of Drama production of the play, to be directed by Tom Haas. At Haas’s suggestion, the authors rewrote many scenes, expanding the narrative role of the infamous translatrix, Constance Garnett, to accommodate Meryl Streep’s talent. “Meryl was amazing,” remembers Innaurato. “We crafted a new ending for her, which she sang like Barbra Streisand. She became Constance Garnett playing Barbra Streisand. That’s the kind of layering we wanted.

That Yale School of Drama performance in 1974 of what was now retitled The Idiots Karamazov was such a riotous success that Robert Brustein asked Drama School graduate William Peters to direct it at Yale Rep the next season. Idiots was put into repertory with an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, directed by Andrejz Wajda. Both Innaurato and Durang’s first professional production, it received a glowing review from New York Times critic Mel Gussow and launched both playwrights’ careers. Durang attributes much of his success at Yale to Stein and Brustein’s vision of theatre training: “Howard and Bob both insisted that playwrights work on a production with the actors.” Durang also acted in a number of plays, including The Idiots Karamazov, in which he played Alyosha.

Both playwrights went on to enjoy considerable success in the seventies and eighties. With the support of Robert Brustein, Durang wrote such popular comedies as The Vietnamization of New Jersey, Baby with the Bathwater, and The Marriage of Bette and Boo – all of which premiered or played under Brustein’s auspices at Yale or the A.R.T. Innaurato gained celebrity with The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie, Gemini, and Coming of Age in Soho.

Although they both became successful comedians, the two authors are quite different as writers. Their personal styles are noticeable in their respective descriptions of co-writing Idiots. Durang’s experiences as a performer taught him to include clearer through-lines for actors. While writing Idiots, Durang’s attention to psychological motivation and character development balanced Innaurato’s unbounded imagination: “Albert’s comic imagination is more anarchic than mine; his brain is very fecund,” Durang observes. “Strange non-sequiturs would pop into his head as we were writing. I found them very funny; but, left to my own devices, I don’t know if I would come up with them. When I wrote with Albert, my imagination became crazier. But I was the one who would occasionally try to tie us back to reality.”

Sustained “reality” is uncharacteristic of Durang’s work, though in some of his later plays, he does write sober, interior monologues that provide a retreat from the surrounding zany scenes. In the middle of The Marriage of Bette and Boo, for example, Bette, in a cry for help, makes a painful phone call to her childhood friend Bonnie. Similarly, at the end of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Durang injects a harsh monologue about cancer, rape, and abortion into an otherwise outrageous farce. Although there are no such monologues in The Idiots Karamazov, Durang believes that the characters have important through-lines. “If the actors don’t play the spine of the play, the production becomes haphazard. Actors need psychological underpinning. Robert Altman made a film version of my play Beyond Therapy that I hate. The characters just run around acting crazy without any psychological truth. But the source of this behavior isn’t recognizable. Some actors, such as Bette Midler and Tommy Derrah (who will star as Constance Garnett), have a strange gift for simultaneously exaggerating and keeping a foot in reality.”

Innaurato is less interested in grounded acting and dramatic structure than Durang. Karin Coonrod, the director of the A.R.T.’s production of Idiots, describes it as a “glorious wrestling match” between the co-authors. Part of that struggle manifests itself in the delicate balance between structure and chaos in the play. “I really loathe structure,” says Innaurato. “This need to make sense of everything is awful. We have to liberate ourselves from that. What makes sense? Nothing makes sense. Our grandfathers had realism. But the second half of this century has forced us to take seriously writers such as Ionesco or Beckett, who come out of an experience of the randomness of life. Theatre has to express that chaos of being. The Idiots Karamazov is about acting, about instantaneous self-transformation. An actor has to have the gift of transformation. Why can’t you become a samovar? Do you need a reason to play a samovar? An actor is someone who can be anything. A mountain. A moon. We humans crave chaos.”

Despite their differences as playwrights, both Durang and Innaurato recognize one another as anarchists who channel their rage through comedy. “Idiots is a free association of two anarchic spirits,” reflects Innaurato. “In Chris’s early plays like Titanic, I see the vengeance of the baby on the parents for having dared to bring it into this world. The only way you can deal with that loathing is comedy. You either laugh or flee. There’s a great deal of animal rage from both of us in. I may be more in touch with my rage because I was raised in a killer family. Chris came from a more genteel family. But I’m sure both families were equally dysfunctional.”

Ryan McKittrick is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.