Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a grasp satirist, died Tuesday evening at his house in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.
His agent, Patrick Herold, stated the trigger was issues of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was discovered to have a uncommon type of dementia, logopenic main progressive aphasia. The analysis was made public in 2022.
An acid, impish author, Mr. Durang by no means met a traditional (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a profession spanning greater than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Concerning topic and theme, he pogoed from intercourse to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a means of collapsing excessive artwork and jokes that aimed a lot decrease.
“He’s so scaldingly humorous,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a good friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang on the Yale Faculty of Drama, stated in an interview. “You snigger with horror at what’s happening and your sheer incapability to do something about it.”
However even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the intercourse and psychoanalysis farce “Past Remedy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was typically a robust undertow of melancholy.
“There was a darkness to a few of his performs, and there was nice humanity to a few of his performs,” André Bishop, the creative director of Lincoln Middle Theater and a champion of Mr. Durang’s work for the reason that early Eighties, stated in an interview. “He was a really, very humorous author. However what he wrote about and what lay beneath these performs was fairly severe.”
His reward, the critic Frank Wealthy of The New York Occasions wrote in 1985, was a “particular knack for wrapping life’s horrors within the main colours of absurdist comedy.”
Mr. Durang was additionally a spirited performer; he typically appeared onstage and sometimes on tv and in movie. He originated the function of Matt within the Public Theater manufacturing of his devastating 1985 autobiographical comedy, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” and he starred because the Toddler of Prague, amongst different roles, in his 1987 comedy “Laughing Wild,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, he and Ms. Weaver co-starred in a late-night cabaret act, “Das Lusitania Songspiel,” which parodied Bertolt Brecht. In 1986, he joined her on “Saturday Night time Stay.” He later headlined a cabaret act, “Chris Durang and Dawne.” Dawne, his backup singers, who had been performed by the actress Sherry Anderson and the author and performer John Augustine. Mr. Augustine and Mr. Durang had been married in 2014, and his husband is his solely survivor.
Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born on Jan. 2, 1949, in Montclair, N.J., the one baby of Francis Ferdinand Durang Jr. and Patricia Elizabeth Durang. His father was an architect., and his mom was a secretary who additionally managed the house. (His father’s alcoholism and his mom’s a number of stillbirths and durations of intense despair had been childhood upheavals that Mr. Durang would translate into “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”)
His mom additionally gave him his first style of theater, taking him a number of occasions a yr to performs and musicals on the Paper Mill Playhouse in close by Millburn, N.J. He wrote his first play, a two-page work impressed by the sitcom “I Love Lucy,” on the age of 8. His Catholic elementary faculty staged it. He later co-wrote two musicals, which his junior excessive and highschool, run by Benedictine monks, placed on.
In school, at Harvard, Mr. Durang had his first severe expertise of despair and stopped writing. However by his senior yr, in a seminar with the playwright and classicist William Alfred, he had returned to performs. He wrote a brief script, “The Nature and Function of the Universe”; when it was learn aloud, the playwright and director Emily Mann, then a fellow pupil, recalled, Mr. Alfred introduced: “We are going to know who Chris Durang is. He’s going to be a number one voice in American theater.”
Mr. Durang graduated from Harvard in 1971 after which matriculated on the Yale Faculty of Drama, graduating in 1974. That yr, his play “The Idiots Karamazov,” written with Albert Innaurato, was carried out on the Yale Repertory Theater, co-starring Meryl Streep. (Each had been additionally fellow college students with him on the Yale faculty, as was the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, one other shut good friend.) “A Historical past of American Movie,” a musical for which Mr. Durang wrote the lyrics, performed on Broadway briefly in 1978.
His breakout got here a yr later, with “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” an absurdist, lacerating one-act profoundly influenced by Mr. Durang’s years in Catholic faculty. (Catholic imagery and themes would seem in lots of his performs.) The play received him his first Obie Award.
In an admiring evaluate in The Occasions, Mr. Wealthy wrote, “Solely a author of actual expertise can write an indignant play that continues to be humorous and managed even in its most savage moments.” Mr. Durang, he confirmed, was simply such a author.
“He simply broke each barrier, each taboo and wrote concerning the issues that almost all mattered to him,” Ms. Mann stated.
Throughout this era, Mr. Durang started taking over small tv and movie roles. He appreciated performing, he later wrote on his web site, as “I truly discover it stress-free how little duty I’ve.”
“I feel to myself: ‘I’m simply chargeable for making my half on this scene work,’” he added.
However as a playwright, he discovered that the success of “Sister Mary Ignatius” was one which he couldn’t simply replicate. (It was tailored for a tv film in 2001, starring Diane Keaton.) His subsequent Off Broadway runs had been restricted, and the Broadway runs of his 1982 play, “Past Remedy,” and his 1996 play, “Intercourse and Longing,” had been even shorter. For greater than a decade, critics disparaged him. Ben Brantley of The Occasions wrote that “Intercourse and Longing” “provides solely faint flashes of the acid, absurdist wit and demented comedian logic that has made Mr. Durang our closest reply to Oscar Wilde.”
Ms. Weaver, a star of that play and lots of different Durang comedies, stated she believed that the critics had been flawed. “Critics would say, ‘Oh, his work is sophomoric,’ as a result of he wasn’t pretentious about it,” she stated. “He was looking for out the place there was justice and the place there was equity. And he stored being disenchanted.”
Just a few years later, Mr. Durang was once more embraced by critics, Mr. Brantley amongst them. “Betty’s Summer season Trip,” which premiered in 1999 at Playwrights Horizons, a fiendish satire of the very American pastime of treating tragedy as fodder leisure, was considered as a return to blackly comedian type. He adopted it with “Miss Witherspoon” (a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), “Why Torture Is Fallacious and the Folks Who Love Them” (2009) and “Vanya and Sonia, and Masha and Spike,” a sensation at Lincoln Middle in 2012 earlier than it transferred to Broadway in 2013.
“Vanya and Sonia” starred Ms. Weaver, David Hyde Pierce and Kristine Nielsen, one other frequent Durang muse. Set in a Bucks County house not in contrast to Mr. Durang’s, the play fed a few his fixed themes — household, need — by way of a Chekhovian grinder. Although larded with audacious jokes and sight gags, the play had a robust emotive core.
“Audiences very a lot responded to it from the primary efficiency,” Mr. Bishop stated. “They only laughed and laughed and laughed. After which they had been fairly moist eyed on the finish of the play.”
The Broadway switch received Mr. Durang a Tony Award for greatest play, his just one.
In 1994, he and Marsha Norman turned co-chairs of the playwrights program on the Juilliard Faculty. Graduates of that program throughout their joint tenure embody David Auburn, Katori Corridor, Joshua Harmon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Martyna Majok.
He retired from that place in 2016, the identical yr he was identified with dementia. For a number of years after that he continued to write down. His remaining produced play, “Turning Off the Morning Information,” a darkish comedy of gun violence, ran in 2018 on the McCarter Theater Middle in Princeton, N.J. An extra script, “Harriet and Different Horrible Folks,” stays unproduced.
“He was deeply severe and wildly humorous,” stated Ms. Norman, who taught alongside him for 3 many years. “That’s who he was. At all times.”