Durang’s World of Dysfunctional Humor

By Erik Piepenburg

To facilitate an Internet search for his work, the playwright Christopher Durang lists the following keywords on his personal Web site: satire, parody and funny – as well as glaucoma drops, butter and zippers. To enter christopherdurang.com, you must click on a photo of a screaming Liv Ullmann.

Randomness and hysterics seem appropriate ways to access the grotesquely humorous world of Durang, the author of plays (“Laughing Wild,”"Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,”"Baby With the Bathwater”) that skewer religious orthodoxy, heterosexual nuptials and the afterlife. His darkly autobiographical play “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” – the one with stillborn children, alcoholism and cancer – originally opened 23 years ago at the Public Theater, with a cast that included Joan Allen, Olympia Dukakis, Mercedes Ruehl and Durang as the narrator. The new Off Broadway revival, directed by Walter Bobbie and starring Victoria Clark and John Glover, with Kate Jennings Grant and Christopher Evan Welch in the title roles, opens July 13 at the Laura Pels Theatre.

Durang, 59, teaches playwriting at Juilliard and has a new play, “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” which is to have its premiere at the Public Theater next spring.

Before a preview of “Bette and Boo,” Durang sat down with Erik Piepenburg. Following are excerpts from their conversation.

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‘The Marriage of Bette and Boo’ It is my one unabashedly biographical play. It has a lot that’s true about my parents’ marriage, both the stillbirths they suffered through and the extended alcoholism throughout the family. I actually left out many other alcoholics in the family because it seemed like overwriting when I added it. …

It was eerie sometimes to feel the biographical repercussions and just go, “Oof, that was painful.” How weird that I’m being this public presenting it, and not only that but, in the original one, being in it.

Now, of course, it’s very long ago. What I went through in my elementary school years and early high school is far behind me, which is a good thing. But I still will from time to time watch the play and say, “This is strange.”

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‘Sister Mary’ I sort of said no to a revival of “Sister Mary” during the height of Bush’s popularity because I just thought the religious right was so strong that I thought I actually don’t want to have this fight. I still think that play has value. The church, although they’ve changed a lot, their dogma is very similar. …

When it started to go out around the country, to St. Louis and Boston, there started to be pickets and protest. This group that’s still around, called the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, they see so-called anti-Catholicism everywhere.

In my view they mistake in my play criticism with bigotry. For God’s sake, it’s my own background I’m writing about. It’s stuff they taught me, the nuns taught me and the church still teaches. I think the church’s teaching on sexuality is still pathological. It’s actually unhealthy.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.