Christopher Durang. (Photo by John Schisler)

First of all, what brought you into theater?  Was it a high school drama club?  Something earlier?

My mother loved theater, and took me (and my father) to theater several times a year.  We lived in New Jersey, about an hour from NYC, so that meant we saw Broadway shows (usually musicals) as well as plays and musicals at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J. (which still exists).

I was taken to the theater by at least age 7, I think.  I was very enamored of theater (and of movies).  My mother also read humorous writers (James Thurber, Robert Benchley), and read plays aloud sometimes (like Noel Coward).  And her older brother (my uncle Barry) was an actor turned stage designer.  So I had a lot of interest in theater around me.  

I decided at age 8 to write a play, and my Catholic grammar school cancelled class one afternoon, and put it on!   (Pretty flexible and adventurous of them, no?)  Then at a later school – a Benedictine junior high/high school called Delbarton in Morristown, N.J. – the school put on two musicals Kevin Farrell and I wrote: Banned in Boston and Businessman’s Holiday.  (Kevin was my best friend, and we wrote the first show when we were 13, the second when we were 15-16.  I did book and lyrics, and Kevin did the music.  Kevin has gone on to be a conductor of Broadway musicals.)

What was your motivation for pursuing a career in acting/playwriting?

I felt early on this sense that I wanted to be a playwright (more than, say, just be an actor).  Starting from age 8 when I “wrote” my first play (2 pages long, but in dialogue; it was based on I Love Lucy, the Lucy has a baby episode).  So for whatever reason I had this little spark that said “I want to be a playwright.”

My high school putting on plays I wrote (which went well) certainly fanned the flames of my theatrical interest.  Then when I applied to colleges, in my application I stressed my theatrical activities.  I had been a good student, and got into several colleges including Harvard, which is where I chose to attend (on scholarship; we didn’t have the money to send me).  Harvard didn’t have a theater major, which I knew in advance; and I decided a well rounded education was better for someone who wanted to be a writer than an education that specialized right away in theater.

Harvard was a wonderful, valuable experience – but it was also a time when I grew up a lot, went through a pretty bad depression, found out I didn’t like academic work anymore, didn’t do well in my classes my middle two years, but pulled myself out of the slump my final year. 

My depression was caused by the negative side of my family upbringing – I come from an alcoholic home, and there was lots of struggle and arguing and no problems ever seemed to get solved.  I had trouble not feeling hopeless about life.  That’s the short version.

And so in college I was depressed, and I stopped writing.  And I questioned whether I was meant to be a writer.  I didn’t know what to do with myself. 

Harvard did offer psychological counseling, and for free!  And I took advantage of it, and eventually lucked out with a very helpful psychologist who over two years ended up helping me get out of my depression.

Early in my senior year I suddenly returned to playwriting, and in a burst of fever-ish energy I wrote The Nature and the Purpose of the Universe my senior year.  (It was written very quickly, in two sittings, sort of poured out of me as if I had bottled up energy inside me.)

This play was in a new, darker, comic style (while my earlier writing was more conventional).  And the play was lucky for me – it got me into a very hard-to-get-into playwriting seminar taught at Harvard by William Alfred (a wonderful professor who also wrote the off-Broadway hit Hogan’s Goat, which was Faye Dunaway’s first step to stardom).  Then it won me a playwriting prize at Smith College (where they put the play on).  And then it got me into Yale School of Drama the next year (where I went to grad school in playwriting, and met many wonderful actors, directors and fellow writers).

That’s a long answer to your question – but I guess my motivation to be a playwright was sort of intuitive during my young years; then I lost that drive and questioned myself during college; then it came back suddenly my final year in college, and with extremely good fortune, I managed to get into Yale School of Drama, which was an excellent next step for me.

Is there a significant point in your career where you knew that you were successful?  Where and why?

Don’t mean to sound like Bill Clinton (as in “depends what the meaning of “is” is”), but it depends on how I define success.  (By the way – in most regards, I like Bill Clinton.)

I had a childhood dream/assumption – based on the Broadway musicals I grew up seeing and having heard of – that success was to have a number of Broadway “hits.” Rodgers and Hammerstein, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, etc. etc.

By the time I finished school (1974), even then Broadway didn’t do many non-musical plays, but off-Broadway did.  And I easily adjusted my hopes to having various off-Broadway hits.  The success barometer for me was having plays that ran a while in NYC.

I have only had one play that had a successful, open-ended run in New York City – Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, which ran two and a half years in NYC, and had long runs other places in the country.  I have had many other plays done in NYC; but they’ve been limited runs of four to five weeks at a non-profit theater like Playwrights Horizons or Manhattan Theatre Club — terrific, but not the same thing as having something run so audiences can see your work over a long period.  And I had two commercial Broadway runs, both of which closed quickly – A History of the American Film in 1978 (when I was 29 or so), and Beyond Therapy in 1982.

So looked at that way, I don’t feel successful.  It’s a childhood dream/assumption in my head that hasn’t been fulfilled.

However, I also do feel successful; I’m lucky and grateful my plays are done many places, and are published, etc. etc.  And I know that choosing to equate success with a show running in New York City is foolish logic.  (But I’m just being honest with your question.)

So here’s where I do feel successful.  I make a living as a writer.  And when I get acting work or teaching work, I sort of throw that in as well, it’s all theater/performing income.  And I wouldn’t have my particular teaching job if I weren’t “known” in theater.

When I was starting out and would meet older, established playwrights, I often would ask them: “how do you make a living?”  There was never a clear answer, because there isn’t one.

But I do consider myself lucky, and successful, to make a living the way I do.  It’s a hard thing to do.  And all those plays with limited runs in NYC were, no question, what let me be known in theater and helped me get screenwriting jobs, and TV writing jobs, and teaching jobs, etc. etc.

And as for my dream/assumption – well, the Broadway I grew up around (as an 8 year old, I saw the tail end of it, I feel) just doesn’t exist anymore. 

So I consider myself successful because I make a living primarily with my playwriting.