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Stage Preview: Durang exorcises demons through plays' characters
Tuesday, April 25, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Don't you just love it when the fictional family you're watching is more whacked than your own? On the stage, screen and TV, familial dysfunction and psychological torment are in, and structured, loving families are way, way out.
Where: O'Reilly Theater, 621 Penn Ave., Downtown.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; 2 p.m. May 13, 18 and 20; 7 p.m. May 16; through May 21.
Tickets: $15-$40. Under 26 or full-time student, $10 advance Fridays and Saturdays. 412-316-1600.
But what happens when the family you're stuck with has fault lines that run deeper than the dysfunctions meant to entertain you? Therapists bill for it by the 50-minute "hour," self-help publishers print an unending stream of advice, and pop psychologists whip out instant appraisals on TV talk shows. Sometimes their guest is Christopher Durang.
"They always assume I'll be funny," he says, "like I'll reveal this bright, happy guy behind the dark characters in my plays. But I have trouble being funny in person."
Durang says he's funnier when he's alone, when the fears and failures of his troubled childhood exorcise themselves through his plays' perverse and twisted characters.
He was a student at Yale when the images of his youth began bubbling to the surface. By the time he wrote his first hit, "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You," Durang had opened a channel between his life and his work, allowing altered images of past emotions to manifest themselves in his stories.
Since then, Durang has become the theater community's Broken Family Poster Child. His latest work, "Betty's Summer Vacation," starts with a normal woman's time share at a summer cottage and twists to progressively include overbearing maternalism, exhibitionism, sexual obsession, rape, torture, serial murder and dismemberment.
He calls it a spoof.
"Sometimes I think my early plays are rather raw in their maniacal darkness," says Durang. "They're usually comic at the same time. But [now] that impulse in me simply isn't the same. I spend more time being concerned with how the audience receives it. ... Betty in 'Betty's Summer Vacation' is important because she's pretty normal, in my opinion. She's there as the audience's surrogate, as their way in, not as saying everyone in the world is crazy."
If Betty invites the audience into her summer home from hell, Durang beckons them deeper into the closet. He holds back little in his work and is surprisingly candid in conversation, as if by exposing his childhood to the glare of the spotlight he might somehow cleanse the stains of being the only child of an alcoholic father and a dominant mom who split when he was 13.
"Most of my plays aren't really based on real life, but they take sometimes real emotions and invent a character that fits," he says. "One play that's unabashedly autobiographical is 'The Marriage of Bette and Boo.' It's my parents and me and my extended family, and I fictionalized it. It's the only [play] with a direct relationship. But in my writing, the psychology comes out. Even in the frenetic parts of my writing, part of it is me and my relatives."
Lots of playwrights invent bizarre characters, but Durang has a way of coaxing an audience to accept perverse extremes and laugh at their believability. It's a skill that was forced upon him as a child.
"In my family, my role was to be the peacemaker," he says. "My father drank and did have a problem, but my mother's nagging of him really did nothing of value. It went on for years and years. As a peacemaker, I failed as a child, and it was depressing. Being the peacemaker when you're young, you become a little adult, and I think that the anarchic part of me and the angry part of me has filtered into my plays more than my life.
"I think when I'm writing I get to explore how people interact in bad ways, and I feel a sense of control that I don't have in life. I [feel] a sense of clarity about the communication, or lack of communication, that people have."
Durang's control of the escalating anarchy in "Betty's Summer Vacation" resulted in four Obie Awards, the Off-Broadway equivalent of the Tonys, in 1999. Munson Hicks is directing the play's second production, the first outside of New York, at the O'Reilly Theater.
"[On the talk shows] I've always been surprised that people think that I was angry when I wrote my plays," he says. "When I write, I seem to be in a good mood. When I'm in a depressed mood is when I'm not writing."
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