Christopher Durang was born in New Jersey in 1949. He attended Catholic grammar and high schools, and entered Harvard College in 1967. Following college, he studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, graduating in 1974.
He began his career as a dramatist early in life:
He began his career as a dramatist early in life:
I decided at age 8 to write a play, and my Catholic grammar school cancelled class one afternoon, and put it on! (Pretty flexible and adventurous of them, no?) Then at a later school – a Benedictine junior high/high school called Delbarton in Morristown, N.J. – the school put on two musicals Kevin Farrell and I wrote: “Banned in Boston” and “Businessman’s Holiday.” (Kevin was my best friend, and we wrote the first show when we were 13, the second when we were 15-16. I did book and lyrics, and Kevin did the music.)
Following graduate school he had several plays staged off- and off-off Broadway, and began developing a reputation as a rising comic talent.
The playwright’s website provides the following summary of his professional career:
Christopher Durang is a playwright whose plays include A History of the American Film (Tony nomination, Best Book of a Musical, 1978), The Actor’s Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (Obie award; off-Bway run 1981-83), Beyond Therapy (on Broadway in 1982, with Dianne Wiest and John Lithgow), Baby with the Bathwater (Playwrights Horizons, 1983), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Public Theatre, 1985; Obie award, Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Award), Laughing Wild (Playwrights Horizons, 1987), Durang/Durang (an evening of six plays at Manhattan Theatre Club, 1994, including the Tennessee Williams’ parody, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls), Sex and Longing (Lincoln Center Theatre production at the Cort Theatre, 1996, starring Sigourney Weaver), and Betty’s Summer Vacation (Playwrights Horizons, 1999; Obie award).
His most recent works are Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, which premiered at City Theatre in Pittsburgh in 2002. And the musical Adrift in Macao, with music by Peter Melnick and book and lyrics by Durang, which premiered at New York Stage and Film in summer 2002, and is under option for off-Broadway 2003-04.
Durang is also a performer, and acted with E. Katherine Kerr in the N.Y. premiere of Laughing Wild, and with Jean Smart in the L.A. production. He shared in an acting ensemble Obie for The Marriage of Bette and Boo; and with John Augustine and Sherry Anderson has performed his crackpot cabaret Chris Durang and Dawne at the Criterion Center, Caroline’s Comedy Club, Williamstown Summer Cabaret, and the Triad, winning a 1996 Bistro Award.
In the early 80s, he and Sigourney Weaver co-wrote and performed in their acclaimed Brecht-Weill parody, Das Lusitania Songspiel, and were both nominated for Drama Desk awards for Best Performer in a Musical.
In 1993 he sang in the five-person off-Broadway Sondheim revue, Putting It Together, with Julie Andrews at the Manhattan Theatre Club. And he played a singing Congressman in the Encores presentation of Call Me Madam with Tyne Daly at City Center.
In movies, he has appeared in The Secret of My Success, Mr. North, The Butcher’s Wife, Housesitter, and The Cowboy Way, among others. . . .
In 1995 he won the prestigious three-year Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award; as part of his grant, he ran a writing workshop for adult children of alcoholics. In 2000 he won the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award.
Behind that list of artistic accomplishments lies a troubled family history that has played an important role in shaping the playwright’s work. The only child of an alcoholic father and a mother enraged by her husband’s drinking, he spent much of his childhood either watching his parents engage in vicious arguments, or fearfully anticipating the onset of the next shouting match. In addition, his parents suffered from a physical incompatibility that made it impossible for his mother to bear additional children. Despite this she continued to conceive, suffering three stillbirths during the years of Durang’s childhood. These traumatic events drove his mother into depression and his father deeper into alcoholism. According to the playwright, his mother told him when he was fourteen that, “there was a year of my life back then that she didn’t know I was alive, after the death of the first baby.” His parents separated when he was in his early teens, and later divorced. “The issues that got fought about never got resolved,” Durang writes, “they just got stirred up and served again, like some poisonous cocktail.” This pattern of constantly-repeated conflict and pain seemed to prove that people were helpless prisoners of their psychological compulsions, incapable of change. Life, Durang would conclude, was just a hopeless cycle of recurrent misery.
It was as a consequence of this painful family background—and the dark view of the world it bred—that he fell into a deep depression during his college years. Therapy eventually helped him overcome his nearly paralyzing illness, but the dismal view of life remained and found expression in his writing.
This would not seem like a promising history for a comic playwright, yet Durang’s plays are often uproariously funny even though his view of human nature is mostly pessimistic and his anger at human institutions deep.
Miss Witherspoon (2005), his most recent work, marks a shift in tone. Although the central character begins her dramatic journey with the kind of dim view of the world that colors Durang’s earlier plays, she gradually discards her soot-colored lenses and begins to entertain the possibility of hope and redemption.
In an interview with The New York Times, Durang acknowledges that for him it is now “possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually.'' As a result, he speculates, it may be that ''one can effect a certain outcome by one's choice.'' In other words, human beings are not necessarily prisoners of their destructive personal histories, and so can risk an optimistic expectation or two. On the other hand, this tentative belief, as expressed in Miss Witherspoon, is ''a fable, half-fantasy. I'm intrigued by three-quarters of it. But I don't entirely believe it.''
The playwright’s website provides the following summary of his professional career:
Christopher Durang is a playwright whose plays include A History of the American Film (Tony nomination, Best Book of a Musical, 1978), The Actor’s Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (Obie award; off-Bway run 1981-83), Beyond Therapy (on Broadway in 1982, with Dianne Wiest and John Lithgow), Baby with the Bathwater (Playwrights Horizons, 1983), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Public Theatre, 1985; Obie award, Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Award), Laughing Wild (Playwrights Horizons, 1987), Durang/Durang (an evening of six plays at Manhattan Theatre Club, 1994, including the Tennessee Williams’ parody, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls), Sex and Longing (Lincoln Center Theatre production at the Cort Theatre, 1996, starring Sigourney Weaver), and Betty’s Summer Vacation (Playwrights Horizons, 1999; Obie award).
His most recent works are Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, which premiered at City Theatre in Pittsburgh in 2002. And the musical Adrift in Macao, with music by Peter Melnick and book and lyrics by Durang, which premiered at New York Stage and Film in summer 2002, and is under option for off-Broadway 2003-04.
Durang is also a performer, and acted with E. Katherine Kerr in the N.Y. premiere of Laughing Wild, and with Jean Smart in the L.A. production. He shared in an acting ensemble Obie for The Marriage of Bette and Boo; and with John Augustine and Sherry Anderson has performed his crackpot cabaret Chris Durang and Dawne at the Criterion Center, Caroline’s Comedy Club, Williamstown Summer Cabaret, and the Triad, winning a 1996 Bistro Award.
In the early 80s, he and Sigourney Weaver co-wrote and performed in their acclaimed Brecht-Weill parody, Das Lusitania Songspiel, and were both nominated for Drama Desk awards for Best Performer in a Musical.
In 1993 he sang in the five-person off-Broadway Sondheim revue, Putting It Together, with Julie Andrews at the Manhattan Theatre Club. And he played a singing Congressman in the Encores presentation of Call Me Madam with Tyne Daly at City Center.
In movies, he has appeared in The Secret of My Success, Mr. North, The Butcher’s Wife, Housesitter, and The Cowboy Way, among others. . . .
In 1995 he won the prestigious three-year Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award; as part of his grant, he ran a writing workshop for adult children of alcoholics. In 2000 he won the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award.
Behind that list of artistic accomplishments lies a troubled family history that has played an important role in shaping the playwright’s work. The only child of an alcoholic father and a mother enraged by her husband’s drinking, he spent much of his childhood either watching his parents engage in vicious arguments, or fearfully anticipating the onset of the next shouting match. In addition, his parents suffered from a physical incompatibility that made it impossible for his mother to bear additional children. Despite this she continued to conceive, suffering three stillbirths during the years of Durang’s childhood. These traumatic events drove his mother into depression and his father deeper into alcoholism. According to the playwright, his mother told him when he was fourteen that, “there was a year of my life back then that she didn’t know I was alive, after the death of the first baby.” His parents separated when he was in his early teens, and later divorced. “The issues that got fought about never got resolved,” Durang writes, “they just got stirred up and served again, like some poisonous cocktail.” This pattern of constantly-repeated conflict and pain seemed to prove that people were helpless prisoners of their psychological compulsions, incapable of change. Life, Durang would conclude, was just a hopeless cycle of recurrent misery.
It was as a consequence of this painful family background—and the dark view of the world it bred—that he fell into a deep depression during his college years. Therapy eventually helped him overcome his nearly paralyzing illness, but the dismal view of life remained and found expression in his writing.
This would not seem like a promising history for a comic playwright, yet Durang’s plays are often uproariously funny even though his view of human nature is mostly pessimistic and his anger at human institutions deep.
Miss Witherspoon (2005), his most recent work, marks a shift in tone. Although the central character begins her dramatic journey with the kind of dim view of the world that colors Durang’s earlier plays, she gradually discards her soot-colored lenses and begins to entertain the possibility of hope and redemption.
In an interview with The New York Times, Durang acknowledges that for him it is now “possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually.'' As a result, he speculates, it may be that ''one can effect a certain outcome by one's choice.'' In other words, human beings are not necessarily prisoners of their destructive personal histories, and so can risk an optimistic expectation or two. On the other hand, this tentative belief, as expressed in Miss Witherspoon, is ''a fable, half-fantasy. I'm intrigued by three-quarters of it. But I don't entirely believe it.''