Christopher Durang (1949-2024)

Christopher Durang

Christopher Durang was a playwright and actor from Montclair, New Jersey. He wrote the plays Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Tony Award), Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Adrift in Macao, Miss Witherspoon (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Betty’s Summer Vacation (Obie Award), Sex and Longing, Laughing Wild, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Baby with the Bathwater, Beyond Therapy (adapted into a film co-written by Durang), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Obie Award, adapted into a telefilm by Durang), The Vietnamization of New Jersey, and The Idiots Karamazov (with Albert Innaurato). His short plays include Wanda’s Visit, A Stye of the Eye, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, The Actor’s Nightmare, Titanic, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, ‘dentity Crisis, and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. In addition, he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical A History of the American Film. For television, he wrote for the series My America, Trying Times, and Comedy Zone in addition to co-writing the telefilm Off-Hollywood. As an actor, he appeared in the films The Out-of-Towners (re-make), Simply Irresistible, The Cowboy Way, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter, The Butcher’s Wife, and The Secret of My Success as well as episodes of Frasier and Tales from the Crypt. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama and Harvard University. He died in Pipersville, Pennsylvania.

An inspiring book.

I had written three plays by 1998 and had caught the bug, as it were. Back then, I averaged only a couple of hours of sleep at night. One can do that at that age, I suppose. I was up on one of these long nights and picked up a book on my nightstand that I had borrowed from the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ (ASFA) play library—it’s the same copy I have now as most of my teacher’s collection was bequeathed to me. The book was Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays. I said, “My. 27. Better write another one if I’m to keep up” and, later that night, my first play edging toward maturity, A Plumber’s Story, was composed. I realize this is not a story about Durang’s work inspiring me, but more about his voluminous bibliography, but it was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news that Durang had passed away due to aphasia, with which he had been living for some time. It should be noted that many of the plays in the above-mentioned collection have given me years of laughter. I suppose the first thing folks of when they see a Durang play is how funny they are. But, beneath that exterior was a weeping heart for the folly of humankind and an anger toward the follies of the world. As far as the theatre is concerned, he was our great satirist—mostly of beloved institutions, but also of society itself.

Durang was a student at Harvard University during the age of the Vietnam protests. The University decided to address these on-campus protests with a pamphlet which was slipped under every dormitory door. The pamphlet was entitled, “The Nature and Purpose of the University.” Glancing at it, Durang thought he read “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe.” The idea that Harvard would put their official stance on such an existentialist idea amused him and a play emerged with that same title. As usual, it was very, very funny.

Yes, that's Durang with Julie Andrews in PUTTING IT TOGETHER.

Later, he attended the Yale School of Drama with his friend Sigourney Weaver and where he was mentored by the late director/critic Robert Brustein. Durang often turned in assignments that ignored all rubric, which delighted Brustein. At Yale, Durang formed a cabaret act with Weaver called Das Lusitania Songspiel and Durang would even accompany Weaver when she hosted Saturday Night Live (and appeared as himself in a Church Chat sketch (Well, isn’t that special?). While he wasn’t particularly known as a performer, he did so sporadically through his life. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in that arena was playing the Commentator in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting it Together. A cast recording of the original production featuring his performance is available.

As for his plays, he had a rocky start in New York where theatre sizes often dwarfed his rather modest staging needs. A very funny long one-act called Titanic, which featured Weaver as a little girl stuffing lettuce up her dress amidst the biting jabs of a bickering husband and wife aboard the ill-fated ship, did well in its first small house, but as it moved Off-Broadway, it had much the same critical problems of the 1997 musical Titanic. A critic need only describe the show itself as a sinking ship (how original) and the run was cut short.

Yours truly, at left, in 'DENTITY CRISIS.

Another early play he wrote in school, ‘dentity Crisis, in which I played Robert in a production at ASFA is a perfect encapsulation of what Durang does best. In it, a clearly sane young woman has been institutionalized for being crazy while it is, in fact, her family that is in desperate need of medical attention. In the play, the character of Robert (in which I was cast) must continually change in and out of several characters (onstage, often within the same line) from being the young woman’s father, grandfather, brother, and mother’s lover. The part was daunting but, of the comic roles I played, it is the one of which I was most proud. I would call the play both side-splittingly funny and terrifying. That is the world Durang depicts: both equally tragic and comic. Sadly, comic playwrights always get short shrift in America as if what they do is somehow lower than naturalistic drama. Hence, it was rather late in life that Durang finally won the Tony for the Chekov-inspired Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, perhaps one of the few plays written since the 2010s that is both crowd-pleasing and masterfully written. This more than made up for his first foray on Broadway: a crash-and-burn turn as the librettist and lyricist for A History of the American Film, with a score by Mel Marvin. Much admired in regional productions, somehow the show didn’t land in New York, though productions appear every now and again in the heartland.

The original Sis. Mary Ignatius.

As it was, Durang’s breakthrough came with a scathing attack on his religious upbringing. The abrasive, even shocking Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (which was adapted into a television film with Diane Keaton years later) premiered in 1979, with the lovable The Actor’s Nightmare as a curtain-raiser. The play is a reunion of Sis. Mary Ignatius’ Sunday School class as adults and shows the result of an all-too common phenomenon among lapsed Catholics. Those raised in the pre-Vatican II era had orthodoxy shoved down their throats and largely rejected religion as adults. Disappointed in her students, Sis. Mary ends up murdering them to save their souls.

BEYOND THERAPY onstage (with a young Niles at left).

The 1980s were perhaps Mr. Durang’s most fertile years beginning with Beyond Therapy. While that play—a simple conceit (the doctors are crazier than the patients, with a love story front and center)—also failed in its New York premiere, but it has gone on to become a staple of regional theatres with its small cast size, short zippy scenes, and virtually no major staging requirements. In reviewing Robert Altman’s film adaptation of the play, Leonard Maltin called it “paper-thin” and perhaps there is an argument for that, but the dialogue always seems to sparkle if the overall play doesn’t have much deep to say regarding neuroticism.

BEYOND THERAPY on film, with the Fly.

That 1987 film adaptation soured Durang on working in Hollywood. While credited as a co-screenwriter, he must have been unaware that Altman used screenplays as jumping off points and often left writers feeling like second or third bananas. From my point of view, Altman’s film basically tells Durang’s play straight, but these scenes are juxtaposed with awkwardly inserted shots of nosy extras and other oddments that distract from the simple story. Altman himself, at that time, was at a low point, adapting plays for television and film and Beyond Therapy is often considered one of his worst films overall. Those people must not have seen the same year’s O. C. and Stiggs (shot in ’84 but released in ’87).

However, the 80s also saw three highly respected plays from Durang—Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Laughing Wild. Largely, Durang’s reputation rests upon these plays. They are what great comic theatre should be. One moment, your jaws on the ground and the other you can barely stay in your seat. Durang made you uncomfortable, of course, but he saw the comedy in the bleakest of life’s intricacies. Perhaps there is a comfort in knowing the abyss but also laughing at it.

FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS.

The ‘90s were a mixed bag for many playwrights who dominated the ‘80s. Durang’s apparently too on-the-nose Media Amok was ridiculed at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston (no version of the play has ever been published), but his evening of one-acts Durang Durang (get it?) included razor sharp parodies of the plays of Tennessee Williams (For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, maybe the greatest parody in the history of the theatre) and Sam Shepard (A Stye of the Eye). Finally, in the 2000s, his Miss Witherspoon became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, his closest shot at being recognized for the mastery with which he wove comedy and tragedy. Durang spent the rest of his working life training playwrights at Julliard with Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman. I’m sure his students benefited from his askance view of the world and skill in navigating minefield-like subjects in his plays.

Perhaps my favorite Durang piece is a comic sketch he wrote for a Carol Burnett special. The Funeral Parlor, a vehicle for Burnett and Robin Williams, was aired twice in the special—both the version as written and a version in which Williams did his typical rapid-fire ad-libbing to try to break up everyone in the room. You can guess which version I preferred (It’s in 27 Plays—check it out).

As a friend pointed out, the world is less funny without Durang. But it also has lost a true satirist—someone who held up the mirror to our iniquities and scalded us with small doses of boiling hot water when we needed it. May he rest in peace, free from the bonds of the world that puzzled and pained him and may he bring laughter to the afterlife.

The Truth Narrative: Ross E. Cheit & Witch Hunts

Last week, in reviewing Netflix’ new docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare, I brusquely went over a subject near and dear—the daycare sex abuse scandals of the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. In addition to the books I recommended to you (by Richard Beck, Debbie Nathan, etc.), there are a litany of other articles and books on the subject. For the McMartin trial in particular the resources of Paul and Shirley Eberle are indispensable (read The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial and The Politics of Child Abuse).

However, for those of you interested in the subject, you might come across another book: Ross E. Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. While it may seem strange to criticize a book from ten years ago, it has implications that threaten to turn what they call today the “narrative” in Cheit’s favor. If Cheit had been successful, it would have revictimized the victims. As it is, there is no book I’m more ashamed to own than his. In fact, Oxford University Press should be ashamed for publishing it.

A handsomely designed and well-cited volume, Cheit attempts to “take back” the narrative by claiming, through what I’m sure was arduous research, that abuse did occur in all of the cases. Needless to say, the “Satanic Panic” has been thoroughly debunked and none of the convictions (save one, thanks to the blindered view of Janet Reno) have ever held muster. Because, again, nothing happened.

It was an example of rampant mass hysteria—a moral panic I hope we never go through again as a society. Cheit has continued periodically to add to his case through blog posts on his website. The extent to which his book is taken seriously, I can’t be sure. When it first arrived, the Catholic Church cases and Penn State were happening and actual child abuse was being taken seriously. Since then, particularly after the last seven years, the subject of sexual abuse in general has been so widespread, I fear Cheit’s tome will reach the hands of those not intelligent enough to see the smoke screen Cheit weaves.

It is a delicate subject, so I will try to go easy on him. In point of fact, Cheit should have never written the book given he himself was the subject of child sex abuse. In elder language, he has a dog in the fight. He desperately wants the children to be believed as we non-deluded folk want the real victims (those accused) to be believed and fully exonerated. To mention that I feel for Dr. Cheit’s childhood experience should go without saying, but the subject being what it is, his work would be akin to someone who had been robbed trying to find guilt in everyone accused of theft. It is an impossibility and, in the end, sad.

I’m beginning to hate the word “narrative” in its contemporary context. Other words like iconic, gaslighting, lenses, etc. follow suit for me. They sound intelligent and, given their wide-spread usage through social media, I think people feel they’re smart when they use them, but really it is just an example of everyone talking like everyone else. Given the internet’s ubiquity (and I realize the irony as you’re reading this online), we will all eventually have no culture, no words specific to region, no color to our speech due to the internet autocorrecting not only our thoughts, but our ideas. Just as I typed this, the computer changed “auto-correcting” to “autocorrecting.”

Professor Cheit’s book is aptly titled given his premise. He goes through all the cases—with the most weight given to McMartin—and cherry picks “evidence” from the trials to spin the narrative back to something happened even if it did not revolve around Satanic Ritual Abuse (another myth that got caught up in the mix). Cheit opened old wounds that had not even healed in a (probably) sincere attempt to recapture the public’s imagination from a different side, given the fact that he had supposed eagle-eyed vision, writing nearly a decade after the last cases were winding down.

In the end, Cheit’s book might as well be a proponent of the flat-earth theory. The nearly one hundred pages of footnotes (that often attack good-faith writers critical of the trials at the time and after, especially the Eberles) could denote to the undiscerning reader that Cheit knows what he’s talking about. This is a Professor at an Ivy League institution, of course. But I’ve read books where half the page-length is devoted to notes and often see it as simple over-compensating for avoiding the truth.

I bought Cheit’s book as soon as I heard of it. I’ll admit I bought it under the presupposition that Cheit agreed with virtually every psychological and sociological assessment of the situation, but I was wrong. I should have gathered his argument from the title, but I was so consumed by the subject at the time, that I didn’t even read the blurb. When the book arrived at home, I dove head-first into it as I often do with non-fiction (fiction takes a lot more time for me to digest and process). It is a book of utter delusion from (again, I think) a sincere human being who wants to “believe the children.”

That catchphrase, used by Beck for his concise telling of the McMartin case, was on many a hastily-put-together poster board in the ‘80s. If you even dared to question the cases at that time, you were open to death threats and all kinds of chicanery. In fact, after HBO premiered Indictment: The McMartin Trial, the Mann home (Abby and Myra Mann, the screenwriters) was burned to the ground, most likely by McMartin parents who still, according to a recent Oxygen documentary, still believe something happened.

I feel for Cheit’s childhood psychological scars, but his book is one of many which proves all you have to do is twist evidence and shape-shift quotes to prove your point. Harold Bloom noted, correctly, in the mid-‘90s that a feminist or Marxist reading of a play by William Shakespeare will teach you a lot about feminism and Marxism, but not anything about the play. Included in this is the various Freudian readings of Sophokles and Shakespeare. His views tell you something about Freudianism, not about the great tragedies of antiquity. Likewise, Cheit cuts the cloth to fit his fashion and presents his own “narrative.”

And Freud is a good note to end on. Because of his salacious (and wrong) Seduction Theory which even he recanted, the world caught onto the idea of repressed memories in the ‘80s. Such cases broke up many homes and destroyed countless lives and they are related to the false memories implanted by therapists in the daycare cases. While Cheit is not as good a writer as Freud (the most generous thing I can say about Freud is he was a gifted creative essayist but not in any way a clinician), they both espouse/d ideas dangerous to society. The truth rarely matters.

Or at least we hope it does.

The Outreau Case and Mass Hysteria: A Review/Essay

**** out of ****

Normally, Netflix releases true crime docuseries. But its newest docuseries is not about a crime. Oh, there’s a trial. There’s a shattered community. There are lives destroyed. But no crime was committed in the Outreau affair, an infamous French court case from the late 1990s that is the latest Netflix docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare.

A typical case of mass hysteria and moral panic, the Outreau affair was the last in a long string of cases that began in the early 1980s. Beginning in Kern County, California, dozens of cases of purported child sex abuse sprang up as far north as Canada and as far south as Florida. Most of these cases, such as the famous McMartin Preschool Trial, involved overzealous police officers, attention-seeking politicians, meddlesome therapists who implanted false memories, and a group of innocent people being purged from society.

Moral panics don’t occur from nothing. They usually appear in moments of societal unease. In the particular case of McMartin, the early ‘80s saw women going to work instead of staying home with their children, leaving them in the care of daycare workers. The residual sturm und drang led to dozens of daycare workers being accused of habitually (and often ritually) abusing children. None of which ever occurred. The McMartin Trial was the longest in California history and cost millions of dollars. To learn more about how this leap transpired (and how Satan got all in the mix), I would refer you to Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children or Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker’s Satan’s Silence or the astonishing television film Indictment: The McMartin Trial, written by Abby and Myra Mann.

At any rate, moral panics are older than America itself and, I believe, are woven into our national fabric. The most obvious example is the Salem Witch Trials, which purged undesirables under the guise of a religion but with both a town and village full of grievances. Arthur Miller saw the connection to the hysteric McCarthy hearings in the 1950s and wrote America’s greatest play, The Crucible. Little did he know his allegory would become more and more prescient as this country falls into these hysterics every twenty to fifty years or so.

When the film version of The Crucible appeared in the mid- ‘90s, most saw it as a period piece about a period piece. In fact, the film spoke to the daycare scandals of the ’80s & ‘90s, including them in the story of witch hunts. An added judge character in the screenplay version is bothered that all of the evidence is coming from the mouths of children. At that time, although the movement was dying down, these cases still came from the mouths of babes—babes who had become convinced of their abuse by helicopter moms and affirming counselors. Yet not one review of the film mentions the connotation.

But while America was the place of most of these scandals, the madness went international. People, often with good intentions, thought they were doing right by indicting seventeen adults of a pedophilic sex ring. As usual, it began with one lunatic—Mariyam Badoui—who let the whole thing spiral out of control. A young magistrate trying to make a name for himself opened up the can of worms which led to thirteen acquittals and a national mea culpa.

The defense table at the McMartin Trial.

What was refreshing about watching The Outreau Case was the footage of the French government apologizing. In America, there’s never been an apology to the lives ruined in Kern County or from McMartin or Fells Acres or Wenatchee. In fact, to this day, sadly deluded adults believe they were still parts of sex rings, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and habitual molestation as children. Every ten years or so, another digging project tries to find hidden tunnels under where McMartin Preschool used to be (according to the children, the location of some of their abuse).

The docuseries is in French, but Netflix rightfully chose to dub into English the entire series. While I usually refuse to watch a foreign-language film with dubbing, the sheer amount of talking in what is naturally a talking-head documentary was the right choice. Outreau is interesting in that it took place a year after the Kern County convictions were overturned and has no connection with anything supernatural. After all, the McMartin children were said to have participated in black masses with ritual animal slaughter. Otherwise, it is the same kind of moral panic (whether over sex or children in general) that we get caught up in every now and again.

My playwriting professor at Bennington College was Gladden Schrock, a beast of a man who, when not teaching, was a commercial herring fisherman in Maine. He became involved with the daycare scandals through his association with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a noted psychologist who proved false memories could be implanted in the lab (hence, nullifying a faddish trend in therapy in the 1980s called “repressed memory therapy”). Gladden was present in 1997 in Salem, Massachusetts for a “Day of Contrition” that mourned those lives ruined by mass hysteria since 1692.

He first turned me onto these phenomena as a young eighteen-year-old. I had written a play about a man falsely accused of sexual abuse and he felt I should know something about the subject. The next morning, my little mail slot was full with a ream of paper on the phenomenon. He opened my eyes to America’s weakness: its trend toward hysteria. We are living in such a time now. People are being purged for their views, their past misgivings, the stance they took as young people, etc. It is a sad fact of human life that we still, at our core, are animals who sometimes offer up their own to predators.

I urge you to watch The Outreau Case and take a course in reasonable skepticism. We live in an age where you are told to blindly believe whatever someone tells you about themselves. There is a danger in that, a grave one. Since we have not learned our lesson, it is always good to get to the nitty gritty as far as our shortfalls.