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Who was Christopher Durang? All we know about Tony-Award-winning playwright as he passes away at 75
Renowned playwright Christopher Durang could occasionally find humor in the most depressing topics. Learn more about him below.
According to his agent, Patrick Herold, the cause of his death was complications from a neurological condition called logopenic primary progressive aphasia. Although the illness was discovered in 2016, Mr. Durang wrote for a few more years, although slowly.
Who was Christopher Durang?
Christopher Durang passed away on April 2 at his Pipersville, Pennsylvania, home. He was a Tony Award-winning playwright and satirist whose blend of absurdist humor, caustic wit, and philosophical examinations of fury, pain, family, and faith made him a mainstay of American theater for more than four decades. His age was 75.
Mr. Durang was polite and kind in person. He was best known for plays that left audiences disoriented and unsettled, marked by a brooding sense of menace or existential angst partly concealed by bawdy humor, surrealist gags, and verbally dexterous monologues.
In addition to satirizing theatrical forms and institutions, his work was replete with cultural allusions (to Mick Jagger, Patty Hearst, and Bertolt Brecht). He made fun of protest plays, traditional sitcoms, soap operas, and parents, among other authoritative figures.
His play Miss Witherspoon, a dark comedy, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. It follows the story of a woman who takes her own life, dies, and then wonders why she can't just be left alone to contemplate in her spiritual form without being reborn. Following the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, he named one of his subsequent plays Why Torture Is Wrong and the People Who Love Them, a post-9/11 parody, as "a comic catharsis."
"My plays can be a bit controversial," he confessed to theater specialist Arthur Holmberg. "Some have argued that they are not meant to be funny, but rather serious. Nonetheless, I like to blend humor with seriousness. It's a way of recognizing the absurdity of the stories we are all a part of." His first big hit was the religious comedy Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (1979).
One of Mr. Durang’s other well-known plays was The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985). This remarkably upbeat comedy drew inspiration from his father’s drinking and his mother’s struggles with melancholy and several stillbirths. The play won Mr. Durang his second of three off-Broadway Obie Awards. It showcased his “special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy,” according to theatre critic Frank Rich of the New York Times.
After over thirty years, he was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play for his darkly humorous homage to Russian writer Anton Chekhov, Vanya and Sonia, and Masha and Spike. His old friends Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce, and Sigourney Weaver were among the play’s cast members when it debuted in 2012 and went to Broadway the following year.
The play, which was set in a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Durang’s rural estate, focused on the relationship between three melancholic siblings, one of whom is a middle-aged woman named Vanya, who bemoans the indignities of modern life and mourns the passing of a more compassionate and gentler time when “we licked postage stamps.”
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Durang’s family and education
Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born in Montclair, New Jersey. His father, an architect who participated in the D-Day assault of Normandy during World War II, and his mother were both employed as secretaries. When he was thirteen, they broke up. When Mr. Durang was eight, his mother took him to musicals at the local Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. His first play, two pages long and “more or less plagiarised,” he claimed, was from the I Love Lucy episode when Lucy has a kid.
After graduating from a Benedictine high school, he attended Harvard College to study English. He claimed that the divorce of his parents and his discovery of his sexual orientation, which occurred during a period when homosexuality was still heavily criminalized, contributed to his acute despair. He had rekindled his passion for theater by his senior year when he organized a musical parody of the Gospels featuring songs like The Dove That Done Me Wrong, sung by the Virgin Mary, and took a seminar with playwright William Alfred.
Writer and actor John Augustine, who had collaborated with Mr. Durang on a cabaret play titled Chris Durang and Dawne, is the only one of Mr. Durang’s immediate survivors. Augustine, Mr. Durang’s spouse since 2014, was stated to have a “sunny nature” that “opened up positive feelings, possibilities, and intuitions,” revitalizing his life and career. The two had been partners since 1986.
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