The Idiots Karamazov
at Theatre at UBC:
On the Subject
By Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato
Directed by Chris McGregor
March 19-28, 2009
7:30 PM
Frederic Wood Theatre
THE IDIOTS KARAMAZOV at Theatre at UBC
By Christopher Durang & Albert Innaurato
Directed by Chris McGregor
March 18 – 28, 2009: FREDERIC WOOD THEATRE
This antic, outrageous and wildly comic send-up of Dostoyevsky's classic novel follows Constance Garnett, an aged and feeble-minded literary translator who has difficulty translating The Brothers Karamazov. Also on stage are characters that perform the story as she relates it. When translations of the text begin to falter, the whole Western canon is puréed before our very eyes. Dotted with literary allusions and intellectual jibes, the play pokes fun at figures ranging from Ernest Hemingway and L. Frank Baum to Leo Tolstoy.
Featuring performances by BFA Acting Candidates Maria Luisa Alvarez, Veronica Baylie, Kim Bennett, Jocelyn Gauthier, Ali Glinert, Krissy Jesudason, Jeff Kaiser, Moneca Ladner, Fiona Mongillo, Michael Neale, Tianna Nori, Maryanne Renzetti, Becky Shrimpton, Kevin Stark, and Russell Zishiri with BA Candidates Harrison Cowan, Will Goldbloom, Ian Labat, Kevin Labat, Mikael Masson and Simon Thistlewood. The creative team includes professional artists Patrick Pennefather (Composition/Sound Design) and alumna Jenifer Darbellay (Costumes) with BFA Design Candidate Rachel Glass (Set), Ereca Hassell (Lighting) and Stacy Sherlock (Sound) as well as Ali Glinert (Choreography).
MFA Director Chris McGregor has received a number of Jessie Richardson Awards including, Outstanding Ensemble Cast (The Pintauro Café), Significant Artistic Achievement (The Devil Box Cabaret), the Larry Lillo Award for Outstanding Direction (Co-Direction, House) and The John Moffat & Larry Lillo Prize (to continue his work on The Cuttlefish). McGregor established Theatre Bagger in 1993 and is the company’s Co-Artistic Director. In 1998 he created the popular Theatre Under the Gun Festival at the VECC. McGregor was Co-Artistic Director of Carousel Theatre from 2001 to ’06, where he directed several award-winning main-stage and touring productions. As an actor he has toured internationally with many companies including The Great Canadian Theatre Company, Green Thumb Theatre, Axis Theatre and Theatre Bagger. Recently he produced The Little Old Man, at the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and the production is in this year’s Spring Break Theatre Festival and Surrey International Children’s Festival.
Christopher Durang is an actor and playwright whose many works include The Actor’s Nightmare, Beyond Therapy, and Laughing Wild. His newest comedy, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, billed as a raucous and provocative satire about America’s growing homeland “insecurity,” premieres at The Public Theatre in NYC on March 24, 2009. Durang is the recipient of many honors including Obie Awards for Sister Mary Ignatius, The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Betty's Summer Vacation. He also earned a Tony Award nomination for A History of the American Film. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2006 for Miss Witherspoon. He is currently Co-Chair of the Playwriting Program at Juilliard.
Albert Innaurato graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where with fellow student Christopher Durang he co-authored and performed in two wild cabaret pieces, I Don’t Generally Like Poetry But Have You Read “Trees”? and The Life Story Of Mitzi Gaynor. Plays include the Broadway hit Gemini which earned an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination and The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie which garnered Innaurato a second Obie and a Drama Desk nomination. He has also written screenplays and for many notable newspapers and magazines as a cultural critic. He has taught playwriting at Columbia University, Princeton and Rutgers. Currently he teaches at The University of the Arts and at MFA Temple University.
Synopsis of the Play
In Brief:
Using the characters and events of The Brothers Karamazov as a springboard,
the play becomes a lampoon not only of Dostoyevsky but of western culture
and literature in general. Dotted with literary allusions and intellectual
jibes, it pokes fun at figures ranging from Ernest Hemingway and L. Frank
Baum on to Leo Tolstoy, as it turns the saga of the ill-fated Karamazov
brothers topsy-turvy. The narrator of the proceedings is the famed but
feeble minded translator, Constance Garnett, who struggles to keep the wild
goings-on in perspective and under control, and, in the end, settles for
conjugating the verb "Karamazov" - which, under the circumstances, makes
more sense than one might suspect.
In Full:
Constance Garnett is the 80 year old, wheelchair bound "tranlatrix" of many
Russian works. (In the original production she was hilariously played by
Meryl Streep, in heavy make-up while still a Drama School student.) Ms.
Garnett attempts to tell the audience her memories of when she translated
Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, but she promptly confuses the Karamazov
brothers with Chekhov's Three Sisters, leading to the song "O We Gotta Get
to Moscow".
Eventually Ms. Garnett starts to tell the story of the innocent monk Alyosha Karamazov, who tries to help his troubled family the intellectual Ivan, the epileptic Smerdyakov, and the sensualist Dmitri who kills his own father over love for the prostitute Grushenka.
But the translatrix's brain is a muddle, and soon Mrs. Karamazov turns out to be more like morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone from Long Day's Journey into Night and Alyosha seems a bit like Edmund from that same play. And then the saintly Father Zossima from the Doestoevsky book turns out to be a gay foot fetishist (which repulses Alyosha who asks "How can there be a God if there are feet?").
Alyosha then meets famous diarist/sensualist Anais Nin, is seduced by her, loses his faith and becomes a pop singer (whose anthem is the rock song Everything's Permitted).
The Russian Revolution comes in, everyone is thrown out into the snow, and eventually Constance Garnett translates herself into the action herself, becoming Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, while the despairing Alyosha is turned into Pip and his mother Mary Tyrone is turned into Estella who dies of an overdose.
The play ends with Constance intoning a closing speech that explodes with first and last lines of famous works, and her final conjugation of the verb Karamazov.
Bio - Christopher Durang
Christopher Durang is a playwright and actor. His plays have been seen on and off-Broadway, around the country and abroad. He usually writes comedy – either satire or dark comedy or parody or just absurdist. He has a B.A. in English from Harvard College, and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama.
As a student at Yale he had several plays presented at the School, and he especially worked at the Yale Cabaret. With fellow playwriting student Albert Innaurato he co-authored and performed in two very crackpot cabaret pieces, I Don’t Generally Like Poetry But Have You Read “Trees”? and The Life Story Of Mitzi Gaynor. Durang later collaborated with fellow student Wendy Wasserstein on another cabaret piece, When Dinah Shore Ruled The Earth.
His first professional production was of The Idiots Karamazov (co-authored with Innaurato) at the Yale Repertory Theatre, in a production starring then student Meryl Streep as the 80 year old nutty “translatrix” Constance Garnett.
After that, his play The Nature And Purpose Of The Universe was presented off-off Broadway at the Direct Theatre in 1975.
His play Titanic, starring his Yale classmate Sigourney Weaver, was done in 1976 at the Direct Theatre, and transferred to off-Broadway along with a satiric cabaret, Das Lusitania Songspiel, co-authored by Durang and Ms. Weaver, and featuring both of them.
In 1976 his play A History Of The American Film was accepted as one of 12 plays done by the prestigious Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference; and from that, Durang’s play received an unusual shared “triple premiere” in 1977, having three back-to-back productions at the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Conn., the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The following year A History Of The American Film was presented on Broadway, earning Durang a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical.
In 1979, Durang and Sigourney Weaver rewrote their Das Lusitania Songspiel and it was done again in the 1979-80 season as a late night show at the Westside Arts Theatre and became a cult success. The piece satirized the work of Brecht and Weill, and presented Brecht-Weill mishmashes of current shows, such as Evita, the Demon First Lady of Fleet Street. Durang and Weaver were both nominated for Drama Desk awards for Best Performer in a Musical.
SISTER MARY, BEYOND THERAPY
In 1980 Durang’s one act play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You was presented for three weeks at the Ensemble Studio Theatre off-off-Broadway and received rave reviews, earning Obie awards for Durang for playwriting and for actress Elizabeth Franz for her portrayal of Sister Mary.
Producers attempted to raise money to move the play to a commercial production for over a year, but without success. Then Andre Bishop came to the rescue in 1981 and re-presented Sister Mary Ignatius… at his Playwrights Horizons theatre, again with Ms. Franz and the director Jerry Zaks, but this time with a new curtain raiser Durang wrote called The Actor’s Nightmare.
The critics embraced Sister Mary again, and the play was moved to off-Broadway, where it ran for over two and a half years. Ms. Franz played the role for a year; subsequent actresses included Nancy Marchand, Mary Louise Wilson, Kathleen Chalfont, Patricia Gage, and Lynn Redgrave.
(And in San Francisco, Sister was played by Ms. Redgrave, then Cloris Leachman, then Peggy Cass. And in Los Angeles she was played by Elizabeth Huddle, Ms. Redgrave, and Valerie Curtin.)
In 1981 he also wrote Beyond Therapy on commission from the Phoenix Theatre, which presented the play off-Broadway starring Sigourney Weaver as Prudence and Stephen Collins as Bruce, directed by Jerry Zaks.
In 1982 the play was presented again, the last third of it rewritten. This time it was presented on Broadway, starring Dianne Wiest as Prudence and John Lithgow as Bruce. David Hyde Pierce, getting his Equity card in his first professional production, played the small but funny role of the waiter Andrew. Peter Michael Goetz played the male therapist, Kate McGregor-Stewart played the female therapist, and Jack Gilpin played Bob.
MORE PLAYS, TV/MOVIE WORK
His next play, Baby With The Bathwater, premiered in 1983 at Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Mark Linn-Baker and featuring Cherry Jones and Tony Shalhoub.
Playwrights Horizons presented the New York premiere of Baby… in 1983 also, directed by Jerry Zaks and featuring Christine Estabrook and W.H. Macy, with Dana Ivey as Nanny and playwright-actor Keith Reddin as Daisy.
Durang then wrote a teleplay for a PBS series called Trying Times, as did other playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein, George C. Wolfe, Albert Innaurato, and Beth Henley. Durang’s half hour was called The Visit and was about an alarming visit from a high school girl friend now grown up and gone mad. It starred Swoosie Kurtz as the high school girl friend, and Jeff Daniels and Julie Hagerty as the unfortunate couple receiving her visit. It was directed by Alan Arkin. (This teleplay was later adapted for stage as Wanda’s Visit and was presented in 1994 in an evening of one acts at the Manhattan Theatre Club called Durang/Durang.)
In the 80s Durang wrote screenplays – House of Husbands co-authored by Wendy Wasserstein; and an original for Warner Bros. called The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance.
In 1985 Joe Papp’s Public Theatre presented Durang’s The Marriage Of Bette And Boo. It was directed by Jerry Zaks, and had a remarkable cast including Joan Allen and Graham Beckel as Bette and Boo, along with Olympia Dukakis, Patricia Falkenhain, Kathryn Grody, Bill McCutcheon, Bill Moor, Mercedes Ruehl, Richard B. Shull, and Durang as Matt. Shortly after opening, the play won Obie awards for Durang in playwriting, Zaks in directing, Loren Sherman in set design, and the entire 10 person cast won an Ensemble Acting Obie award.
After that Durang wrote a sketch for Carol Burnett and became a staff writer for the ABC special Carol And Robin And Whoopi And Carl, directed by Harvey Korman. Carol Burnett and Robin Williams were featured in Durang’s funeral sketch, and Williams won an Emmy award for the special (which sometimes shows up on the Disney Channel).
ACTING IN MOVIES, NIGHTCLUBS; LAUGHING WILD
Around the mid-80s, Durang started to get small roles in movies. His first speaking role was as Davis the put upon executive in Herbert Ross’ The Secret Of My Success starring Michael J. Fox. On Durang’s third day of shooting, Ross hired Durang to punch up some of the dialogue (as playwright Peter Stone had already done with some of the script); and so all the lines Durang got to say he actually wrote, as well as tweaking some of the other scenes.
Durang’s next play was the two-hander Laughing Wild, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1987 and starred E. Katherine Kerr and Durang, directed by Ron Lagomarsino.
In 1988 Durang wrote a short play for the “Home Series” in the downtown theatre called Home for Contemporary Theatre (which later became the theatre Here). The short play was Naomi In The Living Room, directed by Durang and featuring Sherry Anderson, John Augustine and Elizabeth Alley. A couple of years later the play was also presented at part of the Ensemble Studio Theatre one act marathon.
In 1989 Durang returned to cabaret with his mock nightclub act Chris Durang And Dawne at the Criterion Center in New York City. In the act, Durang said he was a playwright but claimed to have found it too hard and so was hoping that doing a lounge act would be easier. His back-up group “Dawne” was played by John Augustine and Sherry Anderson, and the three of them performed songs they claimed they'd been singing around the country at Ramada Inns.
Directed by Deborah Lapidus, the act became a late night cult hit. And Durang/Augustine/Anderson performed the act in several other versions: in the early 90s they were featured in a weekly variety show at the Rainbow Room; then in 1994 they hosted and performed a variety show of their own at Caroline’s Comedy Club, and had such guests as Sigourney Weaver, Al Franken Jr., Julie Halston, Reno, Jody Gelb and Savion Glover. In 1995 they performed an updated version at the Triad Club in New York City, and all three performers won Bistro awards.
VARIED PROJECTS IN THE 90s
In the 1990’s Durang was in New York City less. In 1990 he went to Los Angeles and played opposite Jean Smart in Laughing Wild, directed by Dennis Erdman at the Tiffany Theatre. Both Smart and Durang received Drama Logue awards.
Then he was hired by Warner Bros. to write a sitcom; and sold a crackpot series called Dysfunction! – The TV Show, which was not picked up.
American Repertory Theatre then did his play Media Amok, directed by Les Waters and featuring Anne Pitoniak, Alvin Epstein, Christine Estabrook, and Lewis Black.
He acted in some more films – The Butcher’s Wife, Housesitter, Mr. North.
In 1993 Durang was thrilled to be cast in Putting It Together, a compilation of Stephen Sondheim songs put together to tell a story. Durang played the “provocateur” who stirred things up at a party, and he got to sing and try to dance with Julie Andrews, Stephen Collins, Rachel York, and Michael Rupert. Produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club and directed by Julia McKenzie, this show marked Julie Andrews' first appearance on a stage since Camelot. The Cast Recording of "Putting It Together" is available on CD from amazon.com.
In 1994 his one act play For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls was the hit of the Ensemble Studio Theatre one act marathon in a production directed by Walter Bobbie, featuring Lizbeth MacKay, Keith Reddin, David Aaron Baker, and Patricia Randall.
Later in 1994 Manhattan Theatre Club presented an evening of Durang one acts called Durang/Durang, which included For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls, as well as five other one acts by Durang. The evening was also directed by Walter Bobbie, with the same cast as before with the additions of Patricia Elliott and Becky Ann Baker.
In 1994 Durang and playwright Marsha Norman were named co-chairs of the Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. Since that time to the present, Durang and Norman have run the program, which includes only 8 students a year; and many of their graduates have gone on to distinguish themselves in the professional theatre.
In 1995 Durang played a Congressman who sings “They Like Ike” in the Encores production of Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam starring Tyne Daly.
In 1996 Lincoln Center presented his play Sex And Longing at the Cort Theatre on Broadway, as part of their season. The play was directed by Garland Wright, and featured Sigourney Weaver as Lulu, with Guy Boyd, Dana Ivey, Peter Michael Goetz, Jay Goede and Eric Thal.
In the late 90s Durang again tried his hand writing sitcoms, and wrote one for Fox TV and then one for the WB network. And he acted in the films Life With Mikey (as Santa Claus), Cowboy Way, Simply Irresistible, and the remake of The Out-Of-Towners.
He also worked with A Chorus Line legend Donna McKechnie on her one-woman show Inside the Music, directed by Thommie Walsh. Durang wrote the “text” for her autobiographical show, helping to shape the evening and working on dramatizing her personal stories. The show has been done around the country. Durang was in residence working on it at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
BETTY'S SUMMER VACATION TO THE PRESENT
In 1999 Durang returned to Playwrights Horizons with his play Betty’s Summer Vacation directed by Nicholas Martin. This nightmarish satire of the public’s thirst for tabloid gruesomeness was very much a critical success, and won Durang his third playwriting Obie award, along with Obies for Nicholas Martin’s direction, for Thomas Lynch’s settings, and for actress Kristine Nielsen’s tour de force performance as Mrs. Siezmagraff.
In 2001 Betty’s… was presented at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, again directed by Nicholas Martin and featuring Andrea Martin as Mrs. Siezmagraff.
Showtime/Tri-Star produced a movie version of Durang’s play Sister Mary Ignatius… in 2001. The title was abbreviated to Sister Mary Explains It All, and it starred Diane Keaton, was directed by Marshall Brickman, and produced by Victoria Tennant and Kirk Stambler.
Durang then wrote a teleplay for a proposed trio of pieces on marriage through the decades, also for Showtime. The other writers were Beth Henley and Diana Son, and Durang’s piece was called Labor Day Weekend. It’s still under consideration at Showtime, and may sometime be produced.
Durang went to L.A. for several months to be a regular on a sitcom called Kristin, created by John Marcus and starring the talented theatre actress Kristin Chenoweth. Durang, who has been cast as priests and ministers several times, played the Reverend Thornhill, Kristin’s adviser. He was in 6 episodes, which aired on NBC in early summer 2001.
In 2002 Durang wrote book and lyrics for a 90 minute musical, Adrift In Macao, with music by Peter Melnick. It received a sung reading at the York Theatre, and then a production at the New York Stage and Film at Vassar, directed by Sheryl Kaller. It is under option for off-Broadway for the 2003-04 season.
In 2002 Durang also wrote a crackpot Christmas play called Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge. It was commissioned by the City Theatre in Pittsburgh, and was a big success when produced at that theatre, directed by artistic director Tracy Brigden and starring Kristine Nielsen as the out-of-control Mrs. Cratchit who keeps ruining Scrooge’s story.
Over the years Durang has won many grants and fellowships. Early in his career, he won a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller, the CBS Playwriting Fellowship, the Lecompte du Nouy Foundation grant, and the Kenyon Festival Theatre Playwriting Prize.
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. In 2001 he won an award in literature from the America Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has been a member of the Dramatists Guild since 1978, and a member of the Dramatists Guild Council since 1981.
From: www.christopherdurang.com
Q & A with Christopher Durang
excerpted from www.christopherdurang.com
What was your motivation for pursuing a career in acting/playwrighting?
I felt early on this sense that I wanted to be a playwright (more than, say, just be an actor). Starting from age 8 when I “wrote” my first page (2 pages long, but in dialogue; it was based on “I Love Lucy”, the Lucy has a baby episode). So for whatever reason I had this little spark that said “I want to be a playwright.”
My high school putting on plays I wrote (which went well) certainly fanned the flames of my theatrical interest. Then when I applied to colleges, in my application I stressed my theatrical activities. I had been a good student, and got into several colleges including Harvard, which is where I chose to attend (on scholarship; we didn’t have the money to send me). Harvard didn’t have a theatre major, which I knew in advance; and I decided a well rounded education was better for someone who wanted to be a writer than an education that specialized right away in theatre.
Harvard was a wonderful, valuable experience – but it was also a time when I grew up a lot, went through a pretty bad depression, found out I didn’t like academic work anymore, didn’t do well in my classes my middle two years, but pulled myself out of the slump my final year.
My depression was caused by the negative side of my family upbringing – I come from an alcoholic home, and there was lots of struggle and arguing and no problems ever seemed to get solved. I had trouble not feeling hopeless about life. That’s the short version.
And so in college I was depressed, and I stopped writing. And I questioned whether I was meant to be a writer. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Harvard did offer psychological counseling, and for free! And I took advantage of it, and eventually lucked out with a very helpful psychologist who over two years ended up helping me get out of my depression.
Early in my senior year I suddenly returned to playwriting, and in a burst of fever-ish energy I wrote “The Nature and the Purpose of the Universe” my senior year. (It was written very quickly, in two sittings, sort of poured out of me as if I had bottled up energy inside me.)
This play was in a new, darker, comic style (while my earlier writing was more conventional). And the play was lucky for me – it got me into a very hard-to-get-into playwriting seminar taught at Harvard by William Alfred (a wonderful professor who also wrote the off-Broadway hit “Hogan’s Goat”, which was Faye Dunaway’s first step to stardom). Then it won me a playwriting prize at Smith College (where they put the play on). And then it got me into Yale School of Drama the next year (where I went to grad school in playwriting, and met many wonderful actors, directors and fellow writers).
That’s a long answer to your question – but I guess my motivation to be a playwright was sort of intuitive during my young years; then I lost that drive and questioned myself during college; then it came back suddenly my final year in college, and with extremely good fortune, I managed to get into Yale School of Drama, which was an excellent next step for me.
Do you prefer acting or writing more? Why?
I think I’m more unusual as a writer than I am as an actor.
Also, the playwright really creates the whole event. It’s a bit scarier, because the whole endeavor becomes your personal expression – and when it’s successful it’s very exciting, and when it’s perceived to be a failure, the blame is usually placed at your door.
I’ve had some small acting parts in movies (“Housesitter,” “Butcher’s Wife,” “Mr. North,” “Secret of My Success” and others); and I actually find it relaxing how little responsibility I have. I think to myself: “I’m just responsible for making my part in this scene work.” It’s very different than when I’m a writer, and if a scene isn’t working, due to writing or directing or acting, I know I have to address it and do my best to make sure it’s solved.
I do enjoy another aspect of acting… particularly on stage, acting is very much in the moment. And I love how you can get in synch with a specific audience, and then almost “ride” laughter like a wave. Once you get a laugh from the audience, if you hold your expression, or keep thinking about the issue of the line, the laughter can even build. I love all that. And acting is also more sociable than writing… you get to act with other people, and hang out backstage, and make friends, etc. etc. Writing is very solitary. I have always loved the usually warm family-for-a-while feeling that happens in theatre when a play is put on; and since the actors have to show up every night, their bond in particular is very tight.
So I like both. But I think I’m more distinctive and unusual in my writing than I am in my acting.
Why, with your obvious grasp on tragedy, did you decide to write works of comedy?
A slightly pretentious answer might be to say I didn’t choose comedy, comedy chose me.
I’m not usually funny in person (unless I’ve gotten very, very relaxed with a person). I do think my parents and extended family all had senses of humor.
And I think my early theatre experiences of seeing musical comedies (which my mother loved) sort of primed me for thinking comedically. Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (which won the Pulitzer Prize, an unusual thing for a musical) was written and designed in a cartoon-ish style, and made fun of the business world. They sold “wickets”, whatever they were. The main character rose to the top out of sheer manipulation. The main executives went ga-ga over gorgeous secretaries, etc. It was lively and fun (and Robert Morse was great in it), and I think it influenced me a lot.
There was a lot of sadness in my family so theoretically I could also have written sad, sad dramas… but I just wasn’t drawn to it. I like to laugh. And even though shy, I have a very pronounced loud laugh. (I have a friend, a funny writer, whose mother would always shush him when he laughed at a play or movie and would say disapprovingly, “Hey, you can enjoy something without being silly about it.” I recently read that Jay Leno had just such a mother. I didn’t though. My mother had a bubbling sense of humor and liked to laugh and make people laugh.
Who are some of the major comedic influences in your life?
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, graduated high school in ‘67, during the Vietnam years. In the 50s there weren’t 100 cable channels, they were about 5 TV channels. So "I Love Lucy” (which captivated the nation back then) was an influence. Screwball comedies of the 30s were an influence… I didn’t watch cartoons (I found them dull), but I watched Million Dollar Movie, a NYC TV station (which we got in New Jersey as well) which ran Hollywood movies 7 days a week, the same movie for all 7 days; then they’d change. You know how children love to re-watch things? So I re-watched many of these movies (not 7 times, but maybe 3)… the movies were classic comedies from the 30s like “The Awful Truth” (a comedy about divorce with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant) or “Bringing Up Baby” (a very funny farce with Grant and Katharine Hepburn); or later on, I saw several of the wonderful Preston Sturges comedies. And the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers movies, some of which had funny scripts.
Then musical comedy influenced me. And the books to those usually were comic… even something as commercial as “Damn Yankees” about the baseball player selling his soul to the devil had some first-rate comic writing and construction in it.
Then in high school I started to read lots of plays… Joe Orton was an influence. Arthur Kopit’s “Oh Dad Poor Dad Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad” (which is really a Tennessee Williams parody, kind of) struck me as fun and funny. I’m often said to be influenced by Ionesco… in truth, I only knew “The Bald Soprano,” which I did think was funny. (Oh, and later I did read “Rhinoceros,” where the man turning into one was certainly a coup de theatre. If that’s the correct spelling of that phrase.) And I was influenced by Edward Albee’s “The American Dream,” which came from that brief period when he wrote in the Theatre of the Absurd style. “American Dream” was very much influenced by Ionesco, so I was by default too. Also I realized I was influenced by the very name, “Theatre of the Absurd.” I also loved “Alice in Wonderland” the book, certainly a kind of absurdist work. And James Thurber. And “Winnie the Pooh” (the characters of Eeyore and Owl are actually quite funny).
Do you agree with the theory that most laughter is inspired by the misfortune of "others"? If so, why?
I don’t agree with this theory AT ALL. I laugh a lot, and experientially I never feel like, “Oh ha ha, look at that poor dope, he’s suffering, ha ha, isn’t that funny.” “Oh he got hit on his head, ha ha ha, lucky me, it happened to him.”
I’m very suspicious of theories. I tend to hate any sentence that starts “all comedy contains the element of [blank] in it.” It’s one reason I started to be a bad English major at Harvard; and knew that if I didn’t get into Yale School of Drama to study playwriting (which wasn’t taught theoretically, luckily, back then at least), I didn’t want to go to graduate school in English lit; I found it hard to live in that theoretical realm all the time. (I think writing about things and analyzing them are fine and interesting; I just hate theories.)
I wonder where that theory (the misfortune of others one) came from. It may have been triggered by silent film comedy, which, without words, was often purely visual; and often was about physical falls and pies in the face, etc. etc. I’ve never loved slapstick, and have felt guilty (sort of) for not liking Charlie Chaplin as well as conventional wisdom tells me I should.
But even something like Chaplin’s scene in “Modern Times” where’s he’s a worker on an assembly line, and he has to repeat his gesture of tightening screws so many times that when he stops doing it, his body can’t stop doing the gesture even on his lunch break – even in this example I don’t think it’s his misfortune that is what’s funny.
Instead I think it’s the cleverness of the idea – he takes the thought that people on an assembly line have a hard and boring job, doing the same thing over and over, and he basically says: “look, it’s so bad, their bodies can’t stop doing it.” Then Chaplin’s skill in continuing to do the gesture adds to making you laugh. And it actually makes a point: assembly lines in modern life (modern times) are inhuman and bad for people. It’s actually a humanitarian point, it’s not a “ha ha, look at him suffer, isn’t that funny” point. (In my view at least.)
A similar comic set-up is Lucy and Ethel in the famous chocolate assembly line episode.
The assembly line goes pretty fast, and they are supposed to wrap the chocolates quickly and put them back on the assembly line. First time out they succeed pretty well, though to make it work out, Lucy eats a few of the chocolates to cover the fact she can’t quite do them all on time. The foreman is impressed (not having her seen her eat them), and the speed of the assembly line is accelerated – past how anyone could do it. Lucy and Ethel react to this by continuing to try to do it – an un-doable task – and they end up putting chocolates in their blouses, in their hats, and in their puffed up cheeks.
Now I guess you could argue that it’s their misfortune we’re laughing at – but I feel it’s their nutty invention, and Lucy’s idea that somehow this will work. I mean the logical response – in the real world – would be to say, This is too fast, I can’t do it. In the comic world of I Love Lucy (where Lucy is always trying to make things work out against odds), Lucy’s instincts tell her to keep going and stuff the chocolates every which way. So it’s her impractical but inventive reaction to her predicament that strikes me as funny, I think; not that it can be looked at as misfortune.
Final example. The classic comedy “Some Like It Hot.” Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness a gangland killing in 1920’s Chicago. (Is the killing of the men funny? No.) They’re seen by the killers and have to get out of town. They’re musicians and the only job available for their particular instruments is in all girl band. In this crisis, they decide to dress as women and get this job, which will take them on a train to Florida.
Cut to them dressed as women. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon look funny as women (as men often do); they are uncomfortable in the high heel shoes (an old joke, but funny). And when they get to the bosses of the band and are asked their names, they had a pre-existing plan that Joe (Tony Curtis) would be Josephine and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) would be Geraldine – obvious, “normal” choices. But when asked his/her name, Lemmon says with a little glint in his eye and an irresistible impulse toward improvisation, “Daphne.”
The recurring comedy in Lemmon’s character is in the different, somewhat surprising ways he gets into masquerading as a woman. His impulse to say “Daphne” came from some strange inner voice that thought, “hmmm, I think I look more like a Daphne.” Is that about his misfortune? Not remotely. It’s something odder, and funnier, having to do with the quirks of human nature and character. And there are many other examples like that in the movie.
So no I don’t agree with that theory.
When someone approaches you for tips about writing or performing comedy, what if anything do you tell them?
Play the comedy for real. Exaggerated acting (like in Mel Brooks movies, which I enjoy) is fun, but it wears out its welcome and it never achieves that mixture I like of comedy and seriousness underneath. A lot of comic acting comes from playing the stakes for real, and with great intensity.
What are some of your favorite playwrights?
I don’t have a favorite playwright.
Oddly if I had to choose one, it would probably be Tennessee Williams. Even though I don’t write like him, I so admire and am taken by the psychology of his characters. I find them touching, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. Some of his dialogue is stunning. I think “Glass Menagerie” and “Streetcar Named Desire” are both very great plays.
Playwrights I have admired and enjoyed a lot include:
Noel Coward (whose dialogue style influenced me as a child);
Joe Orton (the darkly comic British playwright, who influenced me in early college);
Federico Fellini (a filmmaker, but his playfulness and the way he casually included his Italian Catholic roots influenced me);
the wonderful composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, with his darkly complex view of human relationships;
Chekhov, for his complicated psychology and his characters’ regrets, and for the way some lines “ping” out at you, like “I’m in mourning for my life” from “Sea Gull” or from "The Three Sisters," the young Irina, happy in the first act, but miserable in the third act as she realizes her hopes for the future have faded and that every day she forgets something she used to know, angrily saying the poignant line “I’ve forgotten the Italian for window and ceiling”;
Caryl Churchill (I especially love her plays “Cloud 9” and “Top Girls”).
Thornton Wilder (“Our Town” is beautiful and heartbreaking; “Skin of Our Teeth” only partially works, but it’s marvelously experimental and fun).
Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Barber. Well, Barber’s a composer. Brecht is bold and inventive and told stories differently. Samuel Beckett was wildly influential for non-realistic theatre; I was excited by his work, my favorite is his “Happy Days” with Winnie buried up to her waist in sand, chattering away. Samuel Barber’s inclusion is a joke, except having brought up the composer, he’s wonderful too. (An obscure favorite: Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” set to a text by James Agee, another wonderful writer.)
American musical comedy in general (Kander and Ebb, Rodgers and Hammerstein). Cabaret, Chicago. Carousel. Carnival. Company. (Gosh, all with the letter C… just coincidence). My Fair Lady. Follies (a big favorite). Annie Get Your Gun (the score at least). The King and I. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (very cartoonish in a fun way, and I think it influenced me a lot; saw it on Bway when I was 9 or 10).
I also admire and enjoy Wendy Wasserstein, John Guare, Marsha Norman, Wallace Shawn, Edward Albee, Robert Anderson, Arthur Miller, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Jules Feiffer, Albert Innaurato, Arthur Kopit, John Patrick Shanley, David Henry Hwang, Tina Howe, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Lanford Wilson, Constance Congdon, Simon Gray, Peter Nichols, John Osborne, Tony Kushner, Craig Lucas…
There are many others I like too, but those are the ones that popped up unbidden to my brain, so I’ll leave it at that.
I love many movies – I’m a movie buff, and one of my early plays was “A History of the American Film,” which kind of assumes knowledge of American movies from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. I like so many movies it’s very hard to choose a favorite.
News! - New Durang Play at the Public Theatre
March 24 Thru April 26, 2009
Christopher Durang has a new comic play entitled Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. The play was written on commission from the Public Theatre and is scheduled to premiere this coming March in the Newman Theatre at the Public.
Returning to The Public for the first time since the 1985 premiere of his play The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Durang is back with another world premiere. With Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them Durang turns political humor upside down with this raucous and provocative satire about America’s growing homeland “insecurity.” The play tells the story of a young woman suddenly in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father’s hobby of butterfly collecting really a cover for his involvement in a shadow government? Why does her mother enjoy going to the theater so much? Does she seek mental escape, or is she insane? Honing in on our private terrors both at home and abroad, Durang oddly relieves our fears in this black comedy for an era of yellow, orange, and red alerts.
The production is directed by Nicholas Martin, who also directed Durang’s 1999 play Betty’s Summer Vacation at Playwrights Horizons. www.publictheater.org
Podcast with Christopher Durang
Down Stage Centre
Original air date - December 2, 2005
Running Time - 1:01:28
Playwright Christopher Durang contemplates issues of faith, family, humor and falling space debris during the concurrent runs of his new play Miss Witherspoon in New York and his new musical Adrift in Macao in Philadelphia.
Downstage Center, a collaboration of the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards) and XM Satellite Radio, is a weekly theatrical interview program that spotlights the creative talents on Broadway, Off-Broadway, across the country and around the world, with in-depth conversations.
http://americantheatrewing.org/downstagecenter/detail/christopher_durang
