The Weird Kid In The Classroom

Mrs. Sorken Presents

written by Christopher Durang

directed by R. J. Cutler and Wesley Savick

at the Hasty Pudding Theater

IF ARTHUR MILLER IS THE DEAN OF American playwrighting, and Tennessee Williams is the professor Emeritus, and Sam Shepard is the radical prof with the cowboy boots and the hash pipe, and Neil Simon the humanities lecturer with perfectly organized presentations and polished anecdotes, then Christopher Durang '71 is the weird kid in the back of the classroom with the odd possessed look.

In other words, Durang foregoes the aura of imperious authority that other leading playwrights create for themselves. Like them, Durang writes about the impossibly difficult problem of getting through life, but he refuses to be pretentious enough to offer a solution. In person, Durang approaches the ideal of the nebbish: short, pudgy, quiet with a polite smile. He's not even that funny to talk to.

His plays, however, have been among the funniest produced by an American in the last decade; they are possessed by a consistent urge to expose the world as the ludicrously cruel place that it is. To use his word, his plays are "giddy" with the realization that life can be damned stupid. "God always answers our prayers," he writes in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, "But sometimes the answer is No.'"

Which brings us to his latest offering, in which the prayers of his audiences are answered with a resounding negation. Mrs. Sorken Presents, presented by the A.R.T. at the Hasty Pudding Theater as part of the New Stages series, is, Durang's first new produced work since his autobiographical Marriage of Bette and Boo closed in New York last year. Unfortunately, he has left behind the rich vein of cultural and personal material he has tapped for ten years, and instead turned to parody and cheap laughs, quite appropriate, at least, for the Pudding stage.

The evening consists of three one-act parodies of other playwrights, introduced by a Mrs. Sorken, a batty theater-party lady with a happy grin and the same strange power of mental disassociation seen in Sister Mary Ignatius; that Mrs. Sorken is portrayed by Elizabeth Franz (who also created the part of Sister Mary) makes the resemblance inevitable. But while Sister Mary expressed Durang's rage about life, God and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, all Franz can portray here is his annoyance with the modern theater, which is certainly interesting but not worth three ten-minute monologues.

The first parody, Ubu Roi, although energetic and hummable, is something of an ambiguous mess. It is either a parody of Alfred Jarry, which is redundant, or a parody of Shakespeare, which Jarry did better. Jarry's Ubu Roi, a scatological lampoon of Macbeth, caused riots in 1893 Paris. At best, Durang's version, featuring a padded Thomas Derrah murdering every one in sight and a cannabalistic bouillabaise, can only imitate Jarry's effects; at worst it is only dull. But as Mrs. Sorken says, "If you don't like it, let your mind wander."

Next up is Desire, Desire, Desire, an overlong and heavyhanded parody of Tennessee Williams that ironically also features the best individual moments. Sandra Shipley slinks about as Blanche DuBois, while James Andreassi as Stanley sits lolling his tongue, shouting "Stella!" every fifteen seconds and occasionally spraying the overheated Blanche with a beer. Funny, but the humor fades long before the actors do. Not even the sudden introduction of Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as instant parodies of Mamet and Beckett tossed in like ingredients in Ubu's wild bouillabaise, can save it from ennui. Every now and then, though, Durang's original wit shines through the sledge-hammer production, as when Andreassi suddenly transforms into Brick from Cat: "What happened between Skipper and me was good! It was pure! Okay, so we dressed up as lumberjacks and french-kissed for an hour, but it was good!"

After a welcome intermission, Mrs. Sorken returns to offer the last entertainment, a parody of Sam Shepard's Lie of the Mind. In an informal interview, Durang said he was inspired to write Stye of the Eye because of the effusive praise the critics ladled onto what he felt was a pretentiously obscure and hateful play. But Durang let his perhaps jealous anger get away from him, and so occasionally the satire sinks to the level of characters shouting at the audience, "See! This is a symbol! It's supposed to mean something!" The audience survives only because Durang finds a way once again to insert more mini-parodies, one of which, a version of Pygmalion as directed by Robert Wilson, finally reaches the level of invention we had hoped for all night. But it will be lost on anyone who hasn't seen any of the Wilson pieces at the A.R.T., and who doesn't realize that the actors slowly pacing across the stage mouthing phonemes once did the same thing but meant it seriously.

Durang has written parodies before; in his History of the American Film and his Idiots Karamazov (written with Albert Innaturato) he relied exclusively on the form. But in each of those cases he used familiar cultural images as springboards to more important--and funnier--issues. This latest offering manages only to stick small pins in some very easy targets; it is a series of in-jokes about the theater that amounts to just a series of in-jokes about the theater. The heavyhanded production does not help; only Elizabeth Franz manages to find the right kind of placid earnestness for Durang's language. For this, Mrs. Sorken at least deserves praise: I only wish she had more to present. The best way for Durang to improve the current state of theater is to write more plays as good as those we have already seen from him; he should leave parody to those incapable of anything else.