Elizabeth Franz in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You at Playwrights Horizons, 1981. (Photo by Susan Cook)

“Manic,” “wicked,” “ferociously funny,” “deliriously assaultive” and “ecstatically angry” are just a few of the words that have been used to describe Christopher Durang and his work in the thirty-plus years since the playwright (and sometime actor) first carved a niche for himself as a smart-aleck and gleefully satiric dramatist whose crackpot creations, simultaneously silly and stinging, would make him one of the American theater’s most original, influential, and therapeutic comic voices.

A New Jersey native who spent his undergraduate years at Harvard, Durang attended the Yale School of Drama in the 1970s, striking pay dirt as a sketch writer and performer in the school’s lighthearted cabaret venue, where his still-legendary contributions included I Don’t Generally Like Poetry But Have You Read ‘Trees’?, co-authored with fellow student Albert Innaurato. Durang went on to make his professional playwriting debut at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1975 with The Idiots Karamazov (also co-written with Innaurato), described by Durang as a “madcap dash through Western literature.” The Yale production starred Meryl Streep—herself a graduate student—as an addled 80-year-old “translatrix” incapable of keeping her Russian classics straight.

Durang subsequently lent his estimable satiric talents to the off-Broadway cult favorite Das Lusitania Songspiel, a Brecht-Weill parody created and performed by Durang and Yale classmate Sigourney Weaver, and he began to gain wider recognition with A History of the American Film, his affectionate and incisive spoof of the Hollywood dream machine, presented in several regional theatres and on Broadway.

But it was Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and Beyond Therapy that established him as a comic writer of substance and staying power. Sister Mary Ignatius, a thoroughly scathing and appallingly funny burlesque of a Catholic school education (of which Durang is a product) dared to reveal the principled outrage underlying its audacity, while the more genial lunacy of Beyond Therapy—which takes aim at the excesses of psychoanalysis, 80s-style—was likewise grounded in recognizable emotional truth.

Elizabeth Franz in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You at Playwrights Horizons, 1981. (Photo by Susan Cook)

In these and subsequent plays—Baby With the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Laughing Wild, Betty’s Summer Vacation—Durang got personal, using the stage as a deliriously empowering bully pulpit to exorcise his own demons and to pillory our needy, neurotic, and overstimulated age, perfecting, along the way, his distinctive passive/aggressive comic sensibility, one that is idiosyncratic, barbed, and hyperbolic, but never shrill or mean-spirited. In an afterword to Baby With the Bathwater, a dysfunctional family play (that is, a play about a dysfunctional family, not a family play that’s dysfunctional) centered on Daisy, who is subjected to a variety of questionable parenting techniques, Durang had this to say about his method: “Taking Daisy’s pain . . . seriously at the same time that I expect the audience to find humor in it has become for me the definition of my style, or at least what I intend it to be: Absurdist comedy married to real feelings.”

To be sure, Durang hasn’t given up writing in a lighter vein, as his recent Christmas Carol spoof, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, and his upcoming noir-ish musical Adift in Macao, attest, but he has returned to the sphere of cauterizing moral comedy in his latest play. Real feelings abound in Miss Witherspoon, whose persnickety heroine finds herself trapped in an afterlife emceed by a relentlessly cheerful spirit guide named Maryamma. Miss Witherspoon has good reason to resist the cycles of reincarnation that are offered up for her edification: life on earth, in her experience, is hardly worth a return trip. Besides, as she repeatedly explains, she’s a Christian, of sorts, and therefore ineligible for karmic recycling.

The conceit is pure Durang, as is its underlying panic and pathos. Not-so-distantly related to the topsy-turvy dystopia of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (another comedy about the world going to hell in a handbasket), Miss Witherspoon casts a doleful eye on the fate of the human race, but Durang, like Wilder, stops short of full frontal cynicism. There’s a kind of desperate hopefulness in his chastising zeal, as well as a sly homage to his forerunner in cosmic angst: not for nothing does Maryamma admonish her recalcitrant charge with: “After all, as Thornton Wilder said, everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal.”