In 2011, my biographer and dear friend, Alexis Greene, wrote a brief book about Chris for Smith and Kraus publishers, and Robert Brustein wrote the Introduction. Bob captured him well in his first paragraph:

“I once described Christopher Durang as an angelic choir boy with arsenic leaching through his fingertips. At the time, I was trying to characterize a unique American writer (he also happened to be a former student and longtime friend) who, professionally, came on like Lucifer throwing matches at the world, but who, in person, was always tender, soft-spoken, and courteous.” 

I knew Christopher since our undergraduate days at Harvard. It was 1971. I was a freshman, he a senior, and we were both in Professor William Alfred’s playwriting seminar. We each had to read from the plays we were writing. At that time, Chris was writing what would become The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, the play that got him into Yale. The play was like nothing any of us had heard before. In anyone else’s hands, it would have been a tragedy. He read quietly, occasionally chuckling at one of his own lines. We were all howling with laughter while feeling profoundly disturbed. At the end, Professor Alfred said, “We will know who Chris Durang is. He is going to be a leading voice in American theatre.”

I wrote a very sad saga about a friend of mine. When I read to the class, wildly smoking and crying, I got a great round of applause from Chris. Chris said to me, “That was very effective. I’m so sorry that happened to you.” I was then probably much more of an actress than a writer, but as always, Chris was generous, and sweet, and encouraging. We always remembered being in that class together and hearing each other read our plays. 

Though we lost regular contact with each other for a couple of decades, (we kept track mostly through reading about or attending each other’s plays, meeting a few times in New York for coffee) I reached out to Chris after I was appointed Artistic Director of McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Chris lived nearby in Bucks County and for the next 25 or so years we were in close contact — for many of those years, daily contact. I commissioned and premiered his last three plays. Miss Witherspoon (finalist for the Pulitzer), Vanya, Sonia… (The Tony Award) and Turning off the Morning News, a play that very simply becomes more urgent with every passing day. I directed the first and third of those plays, and the great Kristine Nielsen was in all three. Each of my opening night gifts to him was a new commission until he turned down the last one. He told me he knew he couldn’t write it, and I had to admit he was right to refuse. I saw the illness start to grip him while we were in development of his final play, and it was clearer each month that the disease was progressing. My heart started to break then. 

Spending both the beginning and end of our careers together has been one of the great privileges and joys of my life. I simply adored Chris. And I learned so much from him. I’ll end with this anecdote about one of the most profound things he taught me. 

I was directing Miss Witherspoon and Chris wisely left rehearsal after the first few days to allow me and the cast to put it up on its feet without pressure. When he returned for the first run-through, we were all a little nervous, of course. But we all got truly scared over the course of the run, as we heard Chris loudly scribbling page after page of notes. Had we completely missed the play? After the run, he told us all how wonderful we were, and we all wanly smiled, not believing him for a minute. He asked me if I’d like his notes, and I said of course I do, and he said, “Then I’ll go home and write them up.” And off he went. We all looked at each other, took a break, and I gave my two short pages of notes to the cast and called it a day. After dinner, I received Chris’s email — of sixteen pages. In all my years directing plays, I’d never received anything like this, but with fear in my heart, I took a deep breath and plunged in. For fourteen and a half pages, Chris wrote about what he liked, what he especially liked, and what he loved. The remaining page and a half were questions about whether or not I thought we’d made the best choice in three spots. Not only was this the most affirming and freeing set of notes I’d ever received, but the most useful. When we got to the inevitable third week and nothing seemed funny anymore, I referred back to his sixteen-page opus and knew immediately and specifically how to get us back on track. It was an invaluable lesson. This was Chris to a T, and I always tell fellow writers and directors about these notes, the best notes I have ever received in my long life in the theatre. Since then, I’ve always tried to follow his lead. 

I will forever miss Chris Durang. And I will be forever grateful to him for the treasure trove of plays he left us and the glorious lessons he taught me. I will always miss his laugh and his warmth, and his tender friendship. Just this week, I reread all his plays, crying and laughing out loud, and there he was in the room with me again. If you miss him, as I do, I highly recommend doing it. Chris is in every line. 

EMILY MANN

 

C

hris Durang was a hero of mine before I ever met him. Discovering his plays in college, I used to call people on the phone and read them passages from Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Beyond Therapy – I think he’s the only playwright I’ve ever done that with. They were just so funny, funnier than anything I had ever read, laugh out loud, on the page, funny. And his voice was unlike anyone else’s. 

I mean, is there a better line than “Are all our prayers answered? Yes, they are; what people who ask that question often don’t realize is that sometimes the answer to our prayer is no.”

Getting to study with Chris at Juilliard, I was in awe. I was so intimidated by him, but he couldn’t have been humbler, kinder, or more approachable and accessible. That the author of these ferocious plays was so gentle just blew my mind. 

Marsha and Chris are both such huge influences of mine. The combined feedback from both of them in class, the combined energy of both of them – infuses all my work, even now. There is probably no greater feeling than getting a laugh from Chris. And he was generous with them. 

While I was at Juilliard, Chris had two shows open in New York: Sex and Longing and Betty’s Summer Vacation. And Chris was incredibly open in sharing his experiences with us. Seeing what a playwright goes through up close gave me more insight into what it was to be a playwright than anything I had ever learned in class. It prepared me for the ups and downs of this dream I had been pursuing for as long as I could remember. It made it real.

Sex and Longing was a three-act play starring Sigourney Weaver and opening cold on Broadway. It was a challenging and ambitious play – very dark, very sexual, violent, but still very much a Chris Durang Comedy. Chris brought us to the first rehearsal in the bowels of Lincoln Center. Sigourney Weaver said hi to us. It was my first time at a professional table read. The director, Garland Wright, spoke; we saw the model for the set. And then the cast read this wild play. A month or so later, after giving us updates in class, he brought us to the dress rehearsal. I’ll never forget, in the second act, Dana Ivey was as funny as anything I have ever seen, and she couldn’t get through the scene without breaking, which, of course, made it even more hysterical. It felt so special to be there, even though we knew something wasn’t working. A few weeks later, he brought us back to a late preview to see how the play had evolved. The stakes were incredibly high for Sex and Longing and it was not well received. We were all so worried about Chris. We had gone on this journey with him. He was a mentor and a hero to us and it was heartbreaking. And you could see his heartbreak in class; his vulnerability. But I learned an invaluable lesson. No playwright sets out to write a play that doesn’t come together. Chris loved this play and worked as hard on it as much as anything he’d ever written. Maybe more.

Soon after, Chris started writing Betty’s Summer Vacation and brought pages to class. And that was inspiring for all of us. To see him get back on that horse. And then, the fact that my teacher brought HIS pages to class and wanted OUR feedback blew my mind. What an incredibly generous thing he did by doing that. We all read parts. Marsha was hilarious as Mrs. Siezmagraff, and my classmate Bob Kerr killed as the man with the hat box. Playwrights Horizons ultimately produced the play the following season and it was a huge hit for them. Rave reviews, multiple extensions – we were all so thrilled for Chris. Justice! The play was every bit as dark and violent and sexual as Sex and Longing, but somehow this time it all came together perfectly. I saw it multiple times, brought my parents... I loved it and, even more so, I was so happy for Chris. It remains one of my favorite theatre going experiences of my life.

What an education. An education on top of the education he and Marsha were already giving us. 

After I graduated, I worked at Juilliard as Literary Manager for two years and got to call him a colleague. And even a friend. Sometimes I’d accompany him to the theatre with his Tony tickets. He’d tell me great stories and then just start humming. He came to a number of my plays – and sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t, but I always felt him in my corner. He had allowed himself to be vulnerable to us and now I could be vulnerable to him. Chris and Marsha’s joint goal, for us to understand the theatre as community, had come full circle.

When I started teaching at NYU, they were my inspirations – nobody has done it better than them. Over the years I have tried to echo some of what they did for us – bringing students to a rehearsal or a reading or even asking for their feedback on my work in class. And whenever I teach Craft, an introductory class, the first two plays I teach are ‘Night Mother and The Marriage of Bette and Boo. This past fall, the students were so bowled over by Bette and Boo, which continues to illicit belly laughs, shock, and wells of emotion, that I had to write Chris a note just to let him know that his work is as meaningful as ever, maybe more meaningful than ever.

DANIEL GOLDFARB

MY HEART GOES BOING!

I first became aware of the world of Christopher Durang when I attended a performance of Sr. Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You at the Westside Arts Theatre in New York City. I had just arrived in the city that fall of 1982 and Sr. Mary was the first play I had the pleasure of seeing since my arrival. Sr. Mary was played by the amazing Nancy Marchand. Being Catholic and gay and having been taught by the Sisters of St. Joseph for eight years and the Christian Brothers for four, I so related to the ideas being presented. These were serious ideas cloaked in comedy.  

Spoiler Alert: In the play’s climax a gun is pulled by Sr. Mary, who then shoots one of her former students after an altercation, and then a second former student, saving the latter from “a life of homosexual sin.” But in the performance that I saw, Sr. Mary pulled the gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger and…nothing. At that point Nancy Marchand, without breaking character, turned to the audience and said, “A malfunctioning prop? Or just something from the warped mind of Christopher Durang? You tell me.”  She then looked back at the first student, who, with no shot and no other options, fell to the ground, dead. Unhinged with religious zeal, Sr. Mary then aimed her gun at the other student, Gary, pulled the trigger and…again nothing. The actor playing Gary, not knowing what else to do, fell to the ground, dead.  The crowd went wild with laughter, having just seen a performance that so embodied the world of Chris and truly underscored the tightrope walk of live theater.

I followed all of Chris’s many plays over the years, as well as his “club act”: Chris Durang and Dawne (the added “e” is intentional), performed by Chris, his life partner John Augustine, and Sherry Anderson. They sang lounge songs they claimed they’d been singing around the country at Ramada Inns. It was silly – and hilarious.

Jumping forward in time to 2012…The director/choreographer Christopher Gattelli, who had been a recent guest at one of our DGF Fellows sessions, asked if I’d like to collaborate with him on a new dance musical. The show, which would eventually be titled In Your Arms, would feature ten original stories by American playwrights, all centering on the theme of “romantic destiny,” with me composing the music for all ten stories. It was a thrilling and daunting task, as I’d never written music strictly for dance, where all the storytelling would be told without the performers speaking.

The first playwright Chris Gattelli reached out to was Christopher Durang!  Chris’s eight-page dance scenario, titled “The Dance Contest,” featured various international dance couples competing by doing pasa dobles, tangos, and waltzes to vinyl LP needle-drop tracks (which I would write).  The piece centered on a Russian love triangle and climaxed with…(wait for it)…a gun that is pulled by the spurned lover, Sergei, and aimed at his rival, Vladimir, as the female dancer, Natasha, tries to intervene.  

In his first draft, Chris Durang included the following pre-recorded “thought-bubble” and stage direction:

Natasha: I heard the sound of a BOING. I’ve never heard that sound before. But when my eyes locked with the eyes of the new dancer... I felt such a strong stirring in my heart. What does hearing a BOING mean? Am I having hearing problems? Or does BOING mean I’ve finally seen my.... What word do I want? ... seen my soul mate. 

The dance continues. 

Note: Maybe there’s an original song that they dance to – “I Saw You and I Heard a BOING.” Or “BOING Went the String of My Heart.” The song plays over the loud speaker, and the couples dance to it. 

The chance to write a song with the great Chris Durang?  Yes, please!

So, dipping my music pen into that memory of Chris’s lounge days with Dawne, I wrote music to Chris’ lyrics.  (And it was quite the catchy tune!)

I look at you.  You look at me.
And something stirs.  What can it be?
I look at you.  You look at me,
And my heart goes BOING!

I must avoid this thing I feel.
But like a pig, I wanna squeal.
I’m not a pig, but this is real,
That my heart goes BOING!

BOING!  BOING!  BOING!
Where am I GOING? GOING? GOING? (pron. to rhyme with “Boing”)
Why do I sing this SOING?   (pron. to rhyme with “Boing”)
It must be all of this… BOING!

I’m feeling love.  I’m feeling lust.
I’m feeling heat.  I may combust!
If it’s our fate, then we must trust
‘Cause our heart keeps going…

BOING!...

BOING!...

BOING!!

I will miss seeing Chris laughing at his own jokes in the rehearsal room, his effortless charm, his kindness, his warmth, and for giving us all so much.  

I think of you, Chris, and my heart goes BOING! 

In Your Arms was developed at NY Stage & Film and premiered at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, on September 24, 2015.

STEPHEN FLAHERTY

 

My first encounter with the work of Christopher Durang was Betty’s Summer Vacation at Playwrights Horizons. I went on the recommendation of a friend’s boyfriend. The boyfriend loved the play so much, he came back to see it again. And he was laughing so hard at what was going on, that at first I was just laughing at him, saying to myself, “damn, this dude’s making me laugh at his laughing at this dude making him laugh.”  And then somehow from there I started really listening to the play. And just like that — poof! I too fell under the spell of Christopher Durang.

Chris was one of those people who, if science fiction were really true, would definitely be the friendly next-door neighbor who was actually an advanced life form slumming on Earth for a while before heading back home to planet Voltron.  Because how the hell could he have come up with all that wonderfully crazy, sidesplittingly hilarious, biting, satiric, out-of-left-field, consistently brilliant, and intellectually stimulating work if he were not an advanced life form from Voltron?

Fade in, fade out; a few years later I’m a Dramatists Guild Council member and Marsha Norman comes up to me and says, “Hey Kirsten, can you sub for me in this playwrights’ class I’m teaching at Juilliard with Christopher Durang?”

I’m already flabbergasted that Marsha Norman (MARSHA NORMAN, do you hear me???) is asking me to sub for her playwriting class?? And her teaching partner is Christopher Durang???

But I’ve had years of experience as a musical theatre performer telling people I can absolutely do stuff I know damn well I can’t do even a little bit, so I coolly say, “Sure, Marsha.”

And I step into the classroom with Christopher Durang. Trying not to panic. Terrified that I’m going to be expected to impart dramaturgical wisdom commensurate with the intellectual level of a superior Voltronian life form.

Turns out, Chris was kind and sweet and funny. And super supportive of me, nodding encouragingly when I decided to stick my two cents in. Which wasn’t that often, frankly — all those fledgling playwrights in that class are luminaries of the theatre now — and even back then, they all knew what the hell they were doing.

Occasionally when I was subbing, if we were lucky, Chris would even share his own work with the class. He read some early writing from a piece he was conceiving about the Skylab space station falling to earth (eventually titled Miss Witherspoon).

He was one of a kind. I can’t speak for any incognito Voltrons among us, but I can definitely speak for quite a few Earthlings when I say his departure from this world has thrown us all a little off-kilter.

In a way that only his writing could make right.

KIRSTEN CHILDS 

 

Those of us who worked with Chris Durang, as I did, might remember a rather serious, professional, calm person. (He was fond of the word “rather,” as in “That’s rather odd.”) Or a person with the best deadpan expression ever, followed by a hearty laugh. Or a person watching the world pass by with the ironic gaze, as he gathered characters and foibles. He could turn the lyric “Hello darkness, my old friend…” into The Sound of Laughter, instead of The Sound of Silence. We shared a love for the comedy of language – puns, alliteration, “rather odd” usage of words. (“It’s so…laconic!”) Chris was a master of language, cultural reference, character quirks, comic timing. He was my teacher, in so many ways, and it was recognition learning – recognizing that musical dramaturgy, for me, was connected to difficult, dark subjects through a comedic lens. And learning how to tackle those subjects musically, asking questions like “Can music be inherently funny? If so, how?”

Chris and I collaborated on two shows. A History of the American Film, which began at Arena Stage then moved to an abbreviated run on Broadway, and Das Lusitania Songspiel, a cabaret concocted by Chris and Sigourney Weaver. David Chambers, our mutual friend who directed HOAF (as we called it), and I still quote lines from the show and laugh out loud. One of the big numbers, a takeoff of “We’re in the Money,” was titled “We’re in the Salad” and featured showgirls dressed as vegetables in sparkling silver glitz, in snazzy choreography by Graciela Daniele, and Swoosie Kurtz singing “I’m a Tomato, I’m red and I’m ripe.” My favorite memory from Songspiel is a mashup of “Moon of Alabama” and “Why Did I Ever Leave Ohio?” (answer: “Oh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why. If I tell you, you will die.”)

At my 70th birthday party bash at Joe’s Pub, Chris appeared and intoned “I don’t know why all of you are being so nice. Mel is the most difficult person I’ve ever worked with.” 

Bravo, Chris. Long may your exceptional, unique work enliven our lives, our discussion, our stages. 

MEL MARVIN

 

Like his bizarre character Tempura in Adrift in Macao, Christopher Durang loved to joke about mortality. He made death a looming presence in many of his plays, offering it up surreally and with quirky humor. In The Marriage of Bette and Boo, for example, the narrator introduces one scene by telling the audience, “Sometime after the divorce… Skippy has dinner with Karl and Soot and Margaret and Paul. Karl is near eighty, Margaret is senile, and Paul and Soot are dead.” The scene ensues around a dinner table with five characters, two of whom “have their heads on the table, dead.” Absurd, oddly familiar, and funny in a way I can only describe as Durangian. Would that actual death were as funny as it is in Chris’s plays. Along with a great many others who were fortunate enough to know and work with him, I grieve his passing. 

My relationship with Chris began in early 2001. I had written two dozen film scores by that time but had never been produced in a musical theatre setting. Chris was beyond gracious to take a cold call from me, exploring the possibility of collaborating on a musical. I sent him some of my music, including a jazzy-bluesy song that put him in mind of an idea he’d been kicking around for a musical parody of film noir. A day or two later he sent me lyrics for a sexy dame who arrives on the docks of Macao and within minutes manages to land a job as a nightclub singer:  

In a foreign city 
In a slinky dress,
The weather’s lookin’ stormy, 
And my hair is quite a mess,  
I lost my lover Billy
Unlucky me, I guess,
Now I’m in a foreign city 
In a slinky dress. 

I set the verse immediately, added a B-section, and fired off a demo to Chris. He loved it a lot, and the song became Adrift in Macao’s opening number. The play received its first performance at NY Stage & Film the following year and opened at Primary Stages in 2007. The parody was outrageously broad but also well-observed, the humor landing on so many levels that my eight-year-old daughter adored it as much as sophisticated adults. I received a Drama Desk nomination for my music, but Macao was not a hit. I agree with a theory advanced by our gifted director, Sheryl Kaller: Adrift in Macao was Christopher Durang in a really good mood, and some people weren’t ready for that. Unfortunately, one of them happened to write theatre reviews for the New York Times, and he was not in a good mood the night he attended. Also, he did not share Chris’s affection for the noir canon, which he dismissed as “ludicrous melodramas.” 

Underlying the humor were serious Durang themes. The play’s characters are all stranded in Macao for unspecified reasons, wanting for, variously, love, opium, and dry socks. In the title song all of them are on edge, filled with a metaphorical longing for home that remains unattainable:

Waiting and wond’ring 
Just what lies ahead
Tomorrow is coming
It fills me with dread...
It’s quite existential
A word we don’t know
We’re adrift in Macao
             Adrift in Macao
And time’s movin’ slow

These characters are all distant relations of Matt, the traumatized but forgiving son of dysfunctional parents in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and the baffled Man in Laughing Wild, who employs a litany of New Age affirmations to cope with life’s unsettling craziness. The difference between Chris and his characters is that Chris made peace with life’s bafflements. He was generous with others, I suspect, because he found a way to be generous toward himself.

 Chris was scary smart and had an incredible breadth of theatre knowledge and experience. A superstar playwright, he could have played the 800-pound gorilla in our collaboration, but he never did. Chris was incredibly fun to work with. He was a lovely, gentle man, and when the going got tough in rehearsals, he was the kindest person in the room. He was also delightfully intolerant of things he found idiotic, but never in a mean way. He giggled at them, actually. His unique comic sensibility was a gift to us all, and for a season, I got to be part of it. I send love and infinite gratitude in his general direction, and deep condolences to his wonderful husband, John Augustine.

PETER MELNICK