Controversial Playwright Returns

In his 57 years, Christopher F. Durang ’71 has acquired more than a few labels. A Harvard professor once called him “mischievous.” A New York Times critic described him as “insidiously satisfying.” And one Jesuit Priest tagged him “a pig trampling in a sanctuary.”

He included that last epithet in his Yale School of Drama application, and he got in. It wasn’t the first time that controversy powered this year’s Harvard Arts Medal recipient’s success in theater, and it certainly wasn’t the last.

“I remain very surprised when people get upset,” Durang says in a phone interview from his home, laughing. “When I’m writing, I think everyone’s just going to agree with me.”

Durang might not intend to provoke, but his taboo subject matter (abortion, homosexuality, child abuse, and the Catholic Church just to name a few topics), coupled with his characteristically absurdist style, rarely fails to spark interest.

A SERIOUS SATIRIST

Durang was raised in a Catholic home in New Jersey and attended Catholic school before arriving at Harvard in 1967. He wrote his first play at age eight and a few more in high school, but it was in college that his trademark style first emerged.

Starting with a “silly little play” he wrote during his senior year here—humbly titled “The Greatest Musical Ever Sung”—Durang has rattled the religious and artistic communities. To this day, he claims that he didn’t mean for the “The Greatest Musical” to offend anyone—he just wanted to write an Irving Berlin-esque musical comedy about the Gospels, complete with song titles like “Everything’s Coming Up Moses.”

The Crimson, in its review of the show, advised those who “still take their Eucharist seriously” to avoid the show, at all costs.

“It was very lighthearted but took…a purposely literal-minded, child’s viewpoint of the Gospels,” he explains.

“The Greatest Musical” was far from the last time that Durang would return to his Catholic upbringing for inspiration. Perhaps most notably, he did it again in 1981’s “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You.” The play earned him the prestigious Obie Award, a prize bestowed by New York newspaper The Village Voice to off-Broadway productions. It was also condemned by the Cardinal of Boston.

“When you’re taught all these rules, you really accept things as fact,” Durang says of Catholic school and “Sister Mary.” “As I child, I just accepted it: You go to hell for murder, you go to hell for just about every sex act, almost, and you go to hell for eating meat on Friday. That’s the kind of thing the play looked at.”

“I just thought everyone else had come to that conclusion by now,” he says, repeating his surprise that people find his work controversial. “But I was wrong.”

A ROUGH PERIOD

Aside from his brief stint as the campus antichrist, Durang’s Harvard days were typical for a sensitive campus undergraduate: he was stressed-out and depressed.

“I kind of went through a bit of a depression at Harvard,” he recalls. “I went through a period of losing self confidence.”

But he says the experience also helped him become more mature. “When I was young, I thought you grew up in high school and then went to college,” he says, but soon discovered that was hardly the case. “We all tended to stand out in our high schools,” he says of his Harvard peers, “and then you get surrounded by everyone else who stood out their high schools, and you go ‘Huh. Maybe I’m not that special.’”

It would seem that the Harvard community has come to disagree with that assessment of the playwright.

Durang says he was “very surprised” and “flattered” when John A. Lithgow ’67—who acted in Durang’s 1982 “Beyond Therapy”—called to inform him that he’d been selected for the Arts Medal.

AWARDS GALORE

Since graduating, Durang has won three Obie Awards, received a Tony Award nomination, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, among other honors. He now teaches in the playwriting program at the Julliard School in New York City.

He says that his creative process rarely involves an attempt to spark debate. “Normally, it’s just sort of having a reaction to things that hopefully you lived through or have opinions on,” he says of his writing process. “I don’t consciously think ‘Oh, I want to bring up this topic and force the world to appreciate that.’”

His most recent play, for example, Pulitzer-nominated “Miss. Witherspoon,” addresses reincarnation issues in the post Sept. 11 world. The character, after killing herself, muses over the state of the nation from the “Netherworld.”

“The first step of impulse in the Miss Witherspoon play was thinking about reincarnation,” he says. “What an awful trap that would be.” The play, along those lines, explores how today’s world might not be so inviting to return to.

Durang’s other plays toy with similarly sacrosanct themes. “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” which also earned him an Obie in 1985, deals with a relationship bittered by alcoholism and stillbirths. “The Vietnamization of New Jersey,” a strange parody of a satire, addresses the hypocrisy of both Vietnam War supporters and protesters.

But his works never leave comedy behind, even if that requires the darkest of humor. His 2002 comedy, “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge,” tells the classic Scrooge tale, except the ghosts keep showing up at inappropriate times, and Bob Cratchit’s wife is planning suicide. 1994’s “Durang/Durang,” an evening of six short plays, includes a Tennessee Williams-inspired, gender flipping parody, titled “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls.”

BEYOND HARVARD

For Durang, Harvard holds many bittersweet reminders of his undergraduate years—memories that he might revisit this weekend, during his visit.

You might find Durang visiting Weld (his freshman dorm), or checking out his old stomping grounds at the Loeb Experimental Theater. It was there that he directed at Harvard for the first time. He insists that “nobody in power at the Loeb saw” the show.

On Friday, Durang will receive the Harvard Arts Medal from University President Lawrence H. Summers. Following the medal ceremony, he will discuss his craft and take questions from the audience, in a discussion moderated by Lithgow.

Durang expects to keep writing plays, though he hasn’t ruled out acting.

“I seem to have the impulse to write a play less frequently than I used to,” he says, something that troubles him slightly. “One theory I have is a lot of my early plays, including the serious ones, were an unconscious writing about my family of origin.” Now, he’s shifted his focus. “I’m writing from my own life or my friends lives or my thoughts about the world, so I think it takes me longer to digest those thoughts than it did family stuff which was so ingrained in me.”

But fans can relax: Durang has hardly exorcised all of his demons. He’s just learned how to keep them under control.

“[In college], I had a bad message in my head that nothing ever works out,” he says. “I still have that message. Although now that I’m older, I go take a nap or tell myself to be quiet.”

—Staff writer Lindsay A. Maizel can be reached at lmaizel@fas.harvard.edu.