Christopher DurangReseñas

Baby with the Bathwater is still funny and irreverent. I am not sure I really understood Laughing Wild as it felt dated or perhaps very personal to Durang. While I enjoyed it's comedy, it felt to far out of my field of experience. I was however, very fascinated by Durang's afterword and his philosophy.

Not being an avid reader or attender of stage plays, I had never heard of Christopher Durang until five or six years ago, when I stumbled upon a cable-produced adaptation of his play "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You." Irreverent humor lampooning religious belief systems is a favorite genre of mine, along with gun-wielding nuns, so I wasted no time in picking up this collection of short plays.

While Durang is basically a humorist, many of his plays involve the lampooning of other plays. This can be a detriment to a reader who, like me, is unable to pick out the subtle stabs at the set design and dialog patterns of other well known playwrites. But it is a minor stumbling block, and not a mjor obstacle to enjoy Durang's offbeat sense of humor.

If you aren't hip to the stage scene, but still enjoy humor with an edge, do what I did. Pick up this collection for "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You", then peruse the rest with an open mind.

Not a rewrite of the original Chekhov; instead, Durang takes names and ideas and applies them to modern day characters who are in some ways eerily similar to their Chekhovian namesakes. In a world that is moving ever faster, Vanya and Sonia are going nowhere, and are feeling the strain of a life passed by, while Masha lives life to the fullest. Their lives all come back together when Masha decides to drop in for a visit - and some bad news. Hilarious at times, but missing the boat at other key moments, it is still an interesting, well written play. In spite of that, I find myself taking it through the process of play development, and seeing all the things that would never pass muster in a script if Durang was not a "name". I suspect as a playwriting teacher, he would not let his students get away with some of the excess verbiage and exposition that makes this piece a bit too laden down to get a full four stars. Having seen it before I read it, I found that the voices in the play tended to mingle with the voices of the performers who had created the roles onstage. Is that good? Bad? I don't know. I think it can never be a bad thing in reading fiction to have the characters come to life for you.½

A skillfully written, funny-as-hell play about the post 9/11 tendency to assign terroristic tendencies where they may not belong. A young woman wakes up married to someone named Zamir who may or may not have slipped her a roofie and may or may not be a criminal, terrorist, and general ne'er-do-well. She takes Zamir to meet her not-grounded-in-reality mother and extremely conservative conspiracy-minded father. Layers upon layers of twisted humor occur.

The Actor's Nightmare - 2m 3f
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You - 3m 3f

The manic genius of the author is in full show here, though spotty at times. Some jokes just plain fall flat, and some acts fail to hit home. In spite of that, it is always a pleasure to read something so different from the standard fare that is offered up by playwrights fully trained in the "rules" of theatre and unwilling to break them. Breaking rules is what Durang is all about. And while I make it a habit not to read the introductory material or afterwords in a book of plays, preferring to let the plays stand by themselves, I do read the notes that are written by Christopher Durang. These are not skippable; skipping his notes should be subject to severe penalty, as he has a way of writing even instructions that is uplifting. In fact, these particular notes addressed an issue I have been struggling with myself as a playwright, and knowing that Durang went through that and came through on the other side (probably not entirely unscathed, but still standing) gives me strength. So read the plays, read the notes, and enjoy.½

A collection of short (and very short) plays by the master of wit. These range from truly delightful to just sort of OK. Some of them are more like SNL skits than plays, and a couple of them really aren't funny at all if taken out of the context of the idea that he is spoofing. Overall, satisfactory and easy to read.½

Favorites: baby with bathwater, laughing wild, idiots karamazov, beyond therapy, theatre

Just plain stupid.

A much more effective and coherent farce than his other plays. His bitterness and anti-Catholic viewpoint are much more focused in this work and actually make his points more effective.

I found the writing to be sophomoric. The author was more interested in belaboring an anti-Catholic viewpoint than in creating good drama.

A short work which could have been improved upon by not having been written at all.

Effective as a piece of theatre -- just not my cup of tea. I just have trouble identifying with characters whose total mode of operation hinges on self-involvement. Even for a farce, the characters are too one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Fairly entertaining from an actor's viewpoint, but I don't know how well it would hold up in the mainstream.

Sheer insanity from a master of insanity. The deep, painful themes of this play are made slightly easier to bear by the ridiculous plotting and strange staging techniques. Love, death, divorce, miscarriages, are all dealt with in such an abstract manner that they seem totally removed from the things we all live each and every day, even though we still remain painfully aware that these are, in fact, the things we all deal with each day. If I may be permitted the oxymoron, this black comedy has a savage gentleness that touches wounds, in fact rips them open, but still allows you to laugh at the blood. Few people will be fortunate enough in their life to write like this; the rest of us are fortunate that Christopher Durang can. Not for people who demand reality in art.½

Classic plays by a master of oddball black comedy. This collection includes two of the best: the Actor's Nightmare and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You. Durang has a way of twisting words and situations into pretzels that seems at first to be just weird, and then when you look at it closer, you see what he's done. He's turned reality on its head and looked at it upside down. His characters are rarely likeable, the situations they get themselves into are the most outrageously ridiculous situations you could imagine, but still his plays work on an intellectual and emotional level. Obviously this sort of comedy isn't for everyone, and as I imagine most of the people I know encountering Durang for the first time, I can't fathom many of them enjoying him, but there is a certain something in the way he paints the world that seems like he's the verbal equivalent of Dali.

In which an over-the-top nun relates the story of her life in soliloquies which emphasize her narrowly focused religious Weltanschauung. As usual with plays, this is better seen than read, but nonetheless a quick, fun read.½

The script of a heavy-handed pastiche of film noir and post-war Oriental adventure movies is filled with silly obvious jokes in which the references are too overt to be post-modern. It is funny enough to raise audible laughter but the musical lacks anything truly memorable. For me its greatest strength was that it reminded me of "The Case of the Dead Flamingo Dancer", which also sank without trace.

Possibly Durang's most powerful work.

Not as easy to follow without being familiar with the source material as Durang's shorter parodies, such as For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and The Sty in the Eye, but still obviously his typical high-quality work. I have no idea why it turns into Great Expectations at the end.

I used some of these plays years ago for high school acting class. Now I wonder how we got away with it. Intelligent, surreal, off-color, and extremely literary, Christopher Durang never disappoints.

What makes this collection wonderful, besides containing most of the wildest snippets of Durang, are the prologues and actors' notes for each play. You're given a glimpse of the more subtle aspects of characters that don't always come through in the text.

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