Playwright Christopher Durang, a Tony winner for ‘Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,’ dies at 75
NEW YORK — Playwright Christopher Durang, a grasp of satire and black comedy who received a Tony Award for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with “Miss Witherspoon,” has died. He was 75.
Durang died Tuesday at his residence in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, of issues from logopenic major progressive aphasia, stated his agent, Patrick Herold. In 2022, it was revealed Durang had been identified in 2016 with the dysfunction, a uncommon type of Alzheimer’s illness.
Durang’s performs had been infused with a wise, high-octane sense of absurdism. His works embody “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” ″Child with the Bathwater,” ″The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” “Betty’s Summer season Trip” and ″Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge.”
“I’m a kind of individuals who laughed at not humorous issues,” Durang advised the group at a Dramatists Guild convention in 2013. “In the event you watch the adults round you make the identical mistake 20 occasions in a row, at a sure level you need to soar out the window otherwise you snort. I used to be one of many ones who laughed.”
The playwright had arguably his brightest profession second with “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a candy and witty play impressed by Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters” with an enormous popular culture urge for food that made it to Broadway starring David Hyde Pierce, Sigourney Weaver and Kristine Nielsen.
It facilities on three middle-aged siblings named after Chekhov characters who’re uneasily negotiating with age. Two of them — Vanya and Sonia — have been sitting round their Pennsylvania residence and bickering for years ever since their dad and mom died. The sibling who escaped, Masha, has turn out to be an unbearable film star and has returned to promote the home, leaving her sister and brother with the prospect of being homeless and penniless.
Durang flung all types of references into his phrase processor: Angelina Jolie, Snow White, Maggie Smith, world warming, Norma Desmond, William Penn, “Peter Pan,” the HBO present “Entourage,” Lindsay Lohan, historic Greek drama, voodoo and, after all, Chekhov. “I’m a wild turkey,” one character says, a riff on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
“I knew I used to be writing a comedy, however for all I knew it might end up comically despairing. I used to be shocked the play was much less bitter than I believed it could be,” Durang advised the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013.
The Related Press referred to as it “all a bit foolish, a tad daffy and really, very candy,” whereas The New York Occasions stated “there’s one thing deeply comforting about Durang, of all folks, delivering Chekhov’s misplaced souls from their everlasting distress, if just for one evening.”
In his Tony acceptance speech, Durang famous that he wrote his first play in second grade in 1958. “It’s been an extended highway however I’m very joyful to be right here,” he advised the group.
His different performs included Broadway’s “Past Remedy” — about two therapists making an attempt to counsel two folks on the lookout for love who’re as needy because the sufferers they’re making an attempt to assist — and “The Actor’s Nightmare,” a couple of man pulled from the viewers right into a play he’s fully unfamiliar with.
He was nominated for a Tony for greatest ebook of a musical in 1978 for “A Historical past of the American Movie” — about Hollywood’s Golden Age — and named a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for “Miss Witherspoon” — a couple of girl who needs to die however is frequently reincarnated on Earth.
Eli Browning, the chief director of Aux Canine Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, stated in 2010 that Durang made catharsis doable via humor.
″Individuals don’t wish to be preached at, however in the event you get them to snort at one thing or at themselves, then you’ve an opportunity to sneak the reality in for them to contemplate,” he advised the Albuquerque Journal.
A New Jersey native, Durang was born to an alcoholic architect and a homemaker — each Catholic. He preferred to speak about his first play, written when he was 8. It was a two-page model of an “I Love Lucy” episode and he obtained to solid and direct. Later he wrote a musical with a pal at a Catholic, all-boys prep college.
Durang attended Harvard School, learning underneath William Alfred, and the Yale Faculty of Drama, the place he was taught by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and met Weaver, with whom he wrote and co-starred within the satiric cabaret “Das Lusitania Songspiel” and who went on to star in a lot of his performs.
Durang was co-chair of The Juilliard Faculty’s playwrights program since its inception, in 1994, with Marsha Norman and has additionally taught at Yale and Princeton. He retired from his place at Juilliard in spring 2016. His college students included playwrights Stephen Belber and David Lindsay-Abaire. The latter took over for him at Juilliard.
Durang’s different Broadway credit embody “All About Me” in 2010 and “Intercourse and Longing” in 1996. He additionally wrote screenplays for such movies as “The Adventures of Lola” and “The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance.” He was a employees author for “Carol and Robin and Whoopi and Carl” in 1985.
He was additionally an actor, together with his first talking function being a put-upon govt in Herbert Ross’ “The Secret of My Success” starring Michael J. Fox. Durang was an everyday on a 2001 sitcom referred to as “Kristin,” starring Kristin Chenoweth. He additionally acted reverse Debra Monk in 2005 in a revival of “Laughing Wild” at The Huntington Theater in Boston.
In 2000, he received the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award. A 12 months later, he received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, he received the distinguished three-year Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award; as a part of his grant, he ran a writing workshop for grownup youngsters of alcoholics. Over his profession, he received three playwrighting Obie awards.
He’s survived by his husband, John Augustine.
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
