{"id":1584,"date":"2024-04-03T21:27:52","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T21:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ventil.rs\/blog\/entertainment\/perspective-christopher-durang-was-the-rare-great-playwright-who-took-comedy-seriously\/"},"modified":"2024-04-03T21:27:52","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T21:27:52","slug":"perspective-christopher-durang-was-the-rare-great-playwright-who-took-comedy-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ventil.rs\/blog\/entertainment\/perspective-christopher-durang-was-the-rare-great-playwright-who-took-comedy-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspective | Christopher Durang was the rare great playwright who took comedy seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Christopher Durang was produced more off-Broadway than on during his some 40-year playwriting career, but he did manage the feat of winning the 2013 Tony Award for best play, for \u201cVanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike\u201d \u2014 in a rare instance when the prize went to a comedy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Not a drama with flashes of humor or the occasional funny line, mind you, but a full-on comedy, packed with zingers and slapstick (enter Snow White). This despite the fact that comedy, Neil Simon notwithstanding, is not taken seriously by those who dole out awards. Durang, who died Tuesday at 75<\/a>, did take it seriously as a genre that was great in and of itself, but also as one that allowed him to sneak in serious ideas and, often, an undercurrent of melancholy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cVanya and Sonia\u201d was uproarious, but some characters were plagued by malaise, others by sheer stupidity, and the show peaks with an epic monologue in which the dyspeptic Vanya rails against the modern world, yet somehow doesn\u2019t come across as Grampa Simpson yelling at a cloud. It was pure Durang, and that approach was already all in the first play by him that I ever saw, in the 1990s. It was \u201cFor Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,\u201d a one-act parody of \u201cThe Glass Menagerie\u201d that replaces Tennessee Williams\u2019s frail Laura with the wildly sensitive, hypochondriacal Lawrence. He collects cocktail stirrers instead of animal figurines, and gives them names. (\u201cI call this one Henry Kissinger, because he wears glasses and it\u2019s made of glass.\u201d) The mix of references, affection and wicked satire \u2014 and what Williams fan does not also enjoy Williams spoofs? \u2014 was like candy laced with arsenic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When David Hyde Pierce<\/a> originated the role of Vanya, he said that Durang \u201chas always been so masterful at incorporating pop and contemporary references into his plays. A lot of times when writers do that, it feels cheap, or it feels like an easy laugh. He always has such a keen ear. And a sophisticated sense of what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yes, all those references do pepper Durang\u2019s work, seasoning without overwhelming the dishes. But there was so much more to it. Seeing more Durang over the years made me realize how much \u201cFor Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,\u201d that seemingly tossed-off bonbon, was ur-Durang. The way he handled existential discomfort, depression (from which he suffered), and the questioning of faith and morality was masterful, and often masterfully funny. (In 1986, he even turned up as the Church Lady\u2019s guest\/antagonist on \u201cSaturday Night Live.<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019m not all that keen on Durang\u2019s early well-known shows, such as his breakthrough, \u201cSister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You\u201d (1979), or \u201cBeyond Therapy\u201d (1981), which was, unfortunately, immortalized by Robert Altman in a bad movie from 1987. While some playwrights hit the bull\u2019s eye in their youth, then try to find the target again as the years and decades mercilessly pass, Durang actually improved with age: His plays got looser, more radical and angry as he went on, perhaps because our world just got more absurd in its madness \u2014 or mad in its absurdity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Durang\u2019s 1999 play, \u201cBetty\u2019s Summer Vacation,\u201d made funny hay of what he called \u201cthe \u2018tabloid-ization\u2019 of American culture,\u201d turning the country\u2019s collective mental and moral apocalypse into a sitcom with a laugh track. He was even more pointed 10 years later, in \u201cWhy Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,\u201d in which a young woman starts suspecting that her new husband might be a terrorist. (In a very Durang-ian touch, they were married by \u201cthis minister guy who also makes porno.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The show considered the paranoia and the obsession with categorizing people that were eating up the country during the war on terror, using a mix of zaniness and surrealism exemplified by the presence in the Public Theater cast of Durang regular Kristine Nielsen \u2014 whose unique combination of daffiness and pathos captures so much of his sensibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At one point, Nielsen\u2019s character says: \u201cI don\u2019t really know what normal is. That\u2019s one of the reasons I go to the theater. To learn that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Oh, how we are going to miss Durang\u2019s version of normality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Durang was produced more off-Broadway than on during his some 40-year playwriting career, but he did manage the feat of winning the 2013 Tony Award for best play, for \u201cVanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike\u201d \u2014 in a rare instance when the prize went to a comedy. Not a drama with flashes of…<\/p>\n

Read More “Perspective | Christopher Durang was the rare great playwright who took comedy seriously”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-apps\/imrs.php?src=https:\/\/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/OWLH4AMJVYP5VGUOH5GFEHMXOY_size-normalized.jpg&w=1440","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"yoast_head":"\nPerspective | Christopher Durang was the rare great playwright who took comedy seriously - Breaking News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ventil.rs\/blog\/entertainment\/perspective-christopher-durang-was-the-rare-great-playwright-who-took-comedy-seriously\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Perspective | Christopher Durang was the rare great playwright who took comedy seriously\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christopher Durang was produced more off-Broadway than on during his some 40-year playwriting career, but he did manage the feat of winning the 2013 Tony Award for best play, for \u201cVanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike\u201d \u2014 in a rare instance when the prize went to a comedy. 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