The Theatre of Christopher Durang

Miriam Chirico, Patrick Lonergan, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Patrick Lonergan, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350246645
• eBook ISBN: 9781474288934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

The Theatre of Christopher Durang considers the works of one of the foremost comedic writers for the American stage. From Durang's early success with the controversial Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1974) to his recent Tony Award-winning play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2012), he has been an original theatrical voice in American theatre. Edith Oliver, long-time theatre critic for The New Yorker, described Durang as "one of the funniest men in the world." Durang challenges traditional dramatic idioms with his irreverent comedies that are as shocking as they are prescient and compassionate. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of Durang's works and incorporates comedic theory to examine how laughter in performance subverts social conventions and hierarchies. Through a clear, detailed discussion of the plays, Miriam Chirico considers Durang's use of black comedy, satire, and parody to explode such topics as: western literature, religion, dysfunctional families, and American social malaise. Robert Combs and Jay Malarcher provide additional critical perspectives about Durang's works, detailing his use of alienation techniques and locating his place within the American parodic tradition. The book also includes a warm introduction by Durang's former student, Pulitzer Prize-winner, David Lindsay-Abaire. The Theatre of Christopher Durang, in demonstrating how Durang has shaped contemporary theatrical possibilities, offers a valuable guide for students of American drama and comedy.

Chapter 1

Perverting the Classics

It is fitting that Christopher Durang’s first major production should tackle head-on one of the world’s greatest authors, Fyodor Doestoevsky. In finding his dramatic voice, Durang and his fellow classmate at Yale, Albert Innaurato, juggled, subverted, and dismantled The Brothers Karamazov, tossing in parodic allusions to Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce, and Charles Dickens for good measure. As every novice writer must clear an authorial space for himself, so Harold Bloom has argued, Durang took on his creative forebears in an imaginary wrestling match where he emerged triumphant. Borrowing Bloom’s phrasing from The Anxiety of Influence (1973), one could say that Durang deliberately “misread” or “misinterpreted” his literary precursors—except even that descriptor would be too polite. Durang’s misreading is an all-out war, a barbaric yawp in the stoic face of the classics. Durang’s mano a mano approach to literary, cultural, theatrical, and film history resulted in a battlefield of maimed quotations, lampooned characters, and bastardized plots. Oh, and lest we forget, it’s riotously funny.

Parody is a derogatory form of art, a piece that pokes fun at the content or the style or the conventions of another work. Max Beerbohm pronounced parody the specialty of youth rather than mature wisdom (Beerbohm 1970, 66), and Durang would be the first to admit his theatrical humor is absurd and juvenile. Taking the nuanced religious debates between Alyosha and his rationalist brother Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov, Durang reduces the two characters’ positions to childishly repeating, “Yes, there is [a God]” and “No, there isn’t” back and forth ten times. Durang’s parody of the novel does not attack so much the work itself, but the overweening respect people have for literary masterpieces. The OED defines parody as a genre whereby “an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous,” but the true attack of The Brothers Karamazov is the institutionalized reverence surrounding highbrow culture, especially the Great Works. The unquestionable placement of the Great Works in the academy was a ripe target for dismantling during the antiauthoritarian 1970s, which Durang must have felt viscerally in the liberal but also rarefied atmosphere of Yale University. Much of Durang’s work during this early decade took well-known literature or cultural stories for his parodic targets: the classics, the Bible, and American television and film. In fact, this parodic style would become Durang’s signature in his satiric revisions, allusions, and appropriations for the rest of his career.

That said, it would be shortsighted of us to consider Durang’s work only as mocking and satiric. In doing so, we would disregard the quality of homage paid to the original writer or text that is inherent in parody. In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon adjusts the commonly-held view of parody as disparaging ridicule and encourages a broader definition of parody as one that reverses the formal features of another piece, what she calls “ironic inversion.” This type of parody is not necessarily a critique of the parodied text, but a thoughtful and playful response. By engaging with the original work, the artist (and by implication the audience) comes to terms with both the literary conventions of the piece and the past. Furthermore, parody requires the reader or the audience member to be “in the know,” to be so familiar with the original text that audiences can perceive the similarities as well as the differences and be in on the joke, so to speak. She writes that “parody is repetition with critical distance” (2000, 4) and explains that

a critical distance is implied between the background text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual “bouncing” (to use E. M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance. (32)

It is important to give this definition some thought because all the plays in this chapter can be considered parodies: they all ironically invert a background text or “bounce” between texts; they are as “critically constructive” as they are joyfully destructive. Durang requires his audience to know the original text in order to enjoy his rambunctious routing. Consequently, the plays in this chapter can be understood as playful and critical, as responses to or assessments of the cultural weight each piece holds in society. Only a work that has artistic significance and substantial meaning can withstand the onslaught of parodic play; each of his plays exposes much of what American society considers worthwhile as it tears it to bits. To read Durang’s plays is to take a journey within the archives of literary and film history as he appropriates and parodies the work of major novelists, playwrights, and directors, while respectfully attesting to the original’s sustained hold over the public imagination.

The Idiots Karamazov

If, according to Bloom, “a poem is a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority” (Bloom 1997, 96), then a play could certainly represent this, too. The Idiots Karamazov, a chaotic dismantling of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was cowritten by Durang and Albert Innaurato.¹ However, the operating mood behind their parody is not so much melancholia as a joyful bloodletting. Durang and Innaurato provide Doestoevsky no filial respect, but rather diminish the serious moral quandaries and patricidal obsession in his novel through their wicked wit. Furthermore, their lampoon includes a large swath of literary history, comically referencing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Beckett’s Endgame, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Meanwhile, modernist authors Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, and Ernest Hemingway are ridiculed for their pretentiousness and literary style. The masterpieces seem to weigh heavily on the young playwrights’ psyches, if only evidenced by their nonsensical inversions of famous lines. When the young monk Alyosha tells Mrs. Karamazov, who doubles as Mary Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey into Night, in a despairing tone of voice, “Mama, I’m going to be a pop star,” Mrs. Karamazov slaps him and yells, “Edmund, stop saying that! It’s just a summer cold” (Durang 1997, 43), deflating the original Mary Tyrone’s maternal obsession over her son’s tuberculosis. “The history of fruitful poetic influence,” Bloom writes, referring to Western literature, “is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist” (30). Durang’s revision of Long Day’s Journey could not be more distorted, willful, or perverse.

It is not only the stories we tell as a culture that shape our narratives but the values inherent in those stories that establish our morality and laws. The Greek definition of “hamartia,” for example, meaning “mis-step,” was translated erroneously by the early Christian Church Fathers as “fatal flaw.” This mistranslation affected how Westerners saw themselves as imperfect beings, incriminated by their own or their predecessors’ actions, doomed to suffer for “the sins of the fathers,” as it is figuratively known. The concept of the fatal flaw and its concomitant morality is imbricated in the Western tragic motif and pervades all literary education. Durang’s parody of The Brothers Karamazov takes examples of such arbitrarily assigned morality, ridicules it, and demotes its importance. For example, his character Dimitri, after being told that his mother was a “Venus Flytrap” who enticed men to their destruction, feels biologically compelled to eat flies; he is ultimately killed by a poisonous spray and his death solemnly labeled “insecticide.” This joke refers back to the early Greek culture’s concern with the taboos involving family liaisons and their linguistic categorization of family-member murders: patricide, infanticide, etc. “Insecticide,” a poisonous substance used for pest control, has no place in this list of taboos, beyond a simple repetition of the root word “cida” (to kill). Labeling his death as such undercuts the neat classification system of family-member murders. The choice to parody The Brothers Karamazov, a novel whose Oedipal themes fascinated Freud himself, further drives home the point that the literary tradition of classical morality weighs paternalistically on young, up-and-coming authors. Several characters carry the bodies of their dead fathers around the stage with them, a literal embodiment of the poetic precursors’ heavy weight, according to Bloom. The onstage narrator, Constance Garnett, becomes obsessed with Fyodor Karamazov’s death, providing the definition of CHALIAPIN, “meaning to be murdered by one’s own son with a pestle,” and detailing its nonsensical conjugation with linguistic glee: “CHALIAPINE, CHALIAPINSKI, CHALIAPINSKIYA, CHALIAPINSKOI . . . CHALIAPINSKINSKI” (Durang 1997, 24). Durang may be taking potshots at Dostoevsky’s novel, but in doing so he targets the overbearing residue of Western literature’s ethics and aesthetics.

What Western literature has given us, through stories of individuals frustrated in their desires, is an understanding of the moral strictures that bind us together as a society. Freud argues in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) that the paradoxical condition of civilization is that it represses the instinctual drives of people, mostly sexual satisfaction and aggression, in order for people to live together safely. We establish laws that proscribe against violence, incest, adultery, murder, rape—even the eating of one’s own species—but the constant pressure of laws and their more minor applications (“Don’t run a stop sign, don’t take someone’s property, don’t hit your sibling”) curb our sense of freedom and happiness. The literary canon stands as a creative exploration of the dreams and fears that resulted from civilization’s socializing influences; it offers countless stories about the vast “thou shalt nots” that weighed heavily upon people and were manifested in the conflicts, themes, and tragedies that make the Great Works great. Toward the end of the play, Durang’s entire cast of characters (including the dead ones), as if to acknowledge the heavy weight of such interdictions, rise and sing the song “Totem and Taboo, and Toto, too,” repudiating all the signs, symbols, and archetypes inherent in literary history, while giving a nod to Freud’s 1913 work Totem and Taboo. Anaïs Pnin, Durang’s caricature of Anaïs Nin, a French-American modernist writer who lived her life in defiance of norms, leads the cast in dismissing the constraining rules of society in favor of pursuing their life’s desires with her summary line: “Dump totem and screw taboo” (57).

The sensual journey of the main character, Alyosha Karamazov, from faithful monk to Palace Theater crooner forms the narrative backbone of the play, but it is the wild antics of his father and three brothers that set the farcical tone. Fyodor, the father, and Alyosha’s eldest brother, Dimitri, the sensualist, romantically pursue the same women, Grushenka, the town Jezebel, as they do in the original. This time around, however, they physically saw Grushenka in half, egregiously misunderstanding the parable of Solomon as told to them by the town’s spiritual elder, Zossima. The two halves of the woman become Grushenka I and II, who join the Russian Revolution as well as the women’s rights movement—it is, after all, the 1970s. While the tone is high farce, the style is densely allusive. When Fyodor fires a gun, he makes an allusion to the inconsequential firing in Uncle Vanya; he lapses into Vanya’s self-abnegating speech: “Oh my life is ruined, I have talent, courage, intelligence. . . . Mother, I’m in despair” (16). Another brother, Ivan, grabs the pistol and shoots a seagull from the sky in a nod to another Chekhov play, then recites Astrov’s question of Nurse, “Do you think that the people who will live a hundred years from now will speak well of us and appreciate our suffering?” (18). The fourth brother, Smerdyakov, supposedly the illegitimate offspring of Fyodor, falls into epileptic fits on the floor, while Alyosha wanders about looking for a spoon to place under his tongue. Father Zossima, no longer the sage religious of Doestoevsky’s tale but a flamboyant monk, attempts to seduce the young Alyosha only to lose him to Anaïs Pnin, when she appears accompanied by Djuna Barnes. The musical number “Everything’s Permitted” closes the play by aptly summarizing the wild excesses Durang has taken with the classical plots and characters. As Mel Gussow summarily concludes, “The brothers are more Marx than Karamazov” (42).

Dostoevsky is not the only precursor with whom Durang does battle; he takes umbrage with the famous nineteenth-century English translator Constance Garnett. Garnett was the first person to translate such authors as Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy into English, translating over seventy works by the end of her career and holding a linguistic monopoly over the field of Russian literature in English for the first part of the twentieth century. Despite her pioneering work, she was later criticized for her tendency to flatten and standardize the Russian writers’ style in order to make it more palatable; as the academic Peter France writes in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translations, “She shortens and simplifies, muting Dostoevsky’s jarring contrasts, sacrificing his insistent rhythms and repetitions, toning down the Russian colouring, explaining and normalizing in all kinds of ways” (France 2000, 595–6). Durang capitalizes on this criticism to make Garnett a figure of fun; as the onstage narrator in a wheelchair, the character rolls herself in and out of the play, her interference denoting the subjective nature of the translator’s work. She confuses authors, bowdlerizes indecent sections of text, and mistranslates phrases of which she was uncertain. She uses outdated language (e.g., especial, vouchsafe), and furthermore proves her incompetence by allowing her Victorian sensibility to affect her translations; she prudishly cannot translate the Russian word “whorehouse” correctly, so Grushenka must say the line “Oh how unhappy it is to be a hostess in a Russian warehouse” instead (29). Although perhaps unfair to disparage this translator who did ground-breaking work, the gesture is more than lampoon. Making Garnett serve as the play’s mouthpiece shows that translation could be another one of Bloom’s revisionary ratios, a subjective adjustment of the original text. “The Russian word for mulatto is Pushkin,” she states, referring to a little-known fact of Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather being African. Played by Meryl Streep in a wheelchair in the original production, she parades through a series of such irrelevant translations, switching between languages: “Dans le jardin Karamazovi steht der junge Alyosha and his brother Ivan” (14) and delineating our knowledge of Russian literature by categorical trivia: “The Russian word for overcoat is Gogol. The Russian word for epileptic is Dostoevsky. The Russian word for accident at the train station is Anna Karenina. The Russian word for bumble bee is Rimsky-Korsakov. The Russian word for an hysterical homosexual is Tchaikovsky!” (53). Because the play is depicted from her narrative point of view, the characters’ absurdities seem a direct result of the warped wonderland of her addled brain. Repeatedly she states that her objective as a translator is clarity, but her resultant flotsam and jetsam could not be further from that case. For example, when she inadvertently refers to the Karamazov brothers with the character names from Chekhov’s play, The Three Sisters, the characters onstage are likewise confused. The three Karamazov brothers, who are mistakenly introduced to the audience as Olga, Masha, and Irena by the translator, have no choice but to sing the song “O We Gotta Get to Moscow,” which is a musical number alluding to the Chekhovian sisters’ plaintive refrain of deferred hopes, rather than anything the Karamazov brothers said: “We’ll Moscow go, / We won’t take no, We’ll Chattanooga choo choo off to Buffalo” (13). Illogical and inconsistent as Garnett is, she acts as a thread holding together the chaotic plot details, as she weaves in and out of the scene and reacts viscerally to the unfolding action, at times even shooting the characters. The play closes with Garnett sliding into a stream-of-consciousness pastiche of famous first lines from great literary works, a disintegrating monument to Western literary scholarship.

The contradictory nature of parody lies in its tendency to be threatening while at the same time legitimizing; the same anarchic attitude that attacks the aesthetic quality of an artwork simultaneously warrants that work as worthy of critique by its high status and notoriety. As Hutcheon notes, “Even in mocking, parody reinforces: in formal terms, it inscribes the mocked conventions onto itself, thereby guaranteeing their continued existence” (75). Any student of drama knows that Long Day’s Journey stands as the definitive play of painful American family relationships. By taking the character of Mary Tyrone and making her the matriarch of the Karamazov clan, Durang legitimizes Long Day’s Journey even while turning it into a source of amusement. The impact of O’Neill’s work comes from the family’s inability to discuss Mary Tyrone’s opium addiction openly or to confront her. Moreover, the father and sons wallow in self-recrimination for past mistakes that led to her addiction. The poisonous guilt they feel, coupled with keeping her problem behind closed doors, creates the play’s tension. In The Idiots Karamazov, most of her speeches are quoted verbatim; it is the mismatched context that renders them humorous. Mary Tyrone slips on and offstage, talking about the fog, her son’s cold, and her marriage; she remembers how she “fell in love with Fyodor Karamazov and was so happy for a time” (45)—the incongruity of the harsh-sounding Russian name in the middle of the dreamlike nostalgia creating laughter. The striking contrast of O’Neill’s lines set against the Karamazov nonsense is an example of Hutcheon’s description of “repetition with critical distance.” When Ivan finds his mother’s hypodermic needles and gently asks her, “Have you then resumed your . . . ‘knitting’?” (29), his lines are in blatant disregard of the obvious. Moreover, the tragic impact of Mary Tyrone trying to hide her morphine addiction is undercut in Durang’s version as she shoots up in front of the audience. Similarly, remo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Christopher Durang Explains It All for Me
• Introduction: Christopher Durang’s Dark Comedy
• 1 Perverting the Classics
• 2 Seeking Is Believing
• 3 One-Act Plays
• 4 Family Dysfunction
• 5 American Anomie
• 6 Critical Perspectives
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright