Playwright Christopher Durang seems on stage with producers to just accept the award for finest play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” on the 67th Annual Tony Awards, on June 9, 2013, in New York. Additionally on stage are actors, background from left, Shalita Grant, Kristine Nielsen and Billy Magnussen. Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP conceal caption
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Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Playwright Christopher Durang seems on stage with producers to just accept the award for finest play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” on the 67th Annual Tony Awards, on June 9, 2013, in New York. Additionally on stage are actors, background from left, Shalita Grant, Kristine Nielsen and Billy Magnussen.
Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
NEW YORK — Playwright Christopher Durang, a grasp of satire and black comedy who gained a Tony Award for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with “Miss Witherspoon,” has died. He was 75.
Durang died Tuesday at his house in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, of problems from logopenic major progressive aphasia, mentioned his agent, Patrick Herold. In 2022, it was revealed Durang had been recognized in 2016 with the dysfunction, a uncommon type of Alzheimer’s illness.
Durang’s performs have been infused with a wise, high-octane sense of absurdism. His works embody “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” ″Child with the Bathwater,” ″The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” “Betty’s Summer time Trip” and ″Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge.”
“I’m a kind of individuals who laughed at not humorous issues,” Durang advised the gang at a Dramatists Guild convention in 2013. “When you watch the adults round you make the identical mistake 20 occasions in a row, at a sure level you wish to soar out the window otherwise you giggle. I used to be one of many ones who laughed.”
The playwright had arguably his brightest profession second with “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a candy and witty play impressed by Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters” with an enormous popular culture urge for food that made it to Broadway starring David Hyde Pierce, Sigourney Weaver and Kristine Nielsen.
It facilities on three middle-aged siblings named after Chekhov characters who’re uneasily negotiating with age. Two of them — Vanya and Sonia — have been sitting round their Pennsylvania house and bickering for years ever since their mother and father died. The sibling who escaped, Masha, has develop into an unbearable film star and has returned to promote the home, leaving her sister and brother with the prospect of being homeless and penniless.
Durang flung all types of references into his phrase processor: Angelina Jolie, Snow White, Maggie Smith, international warming, Norma Desmond, William Penn, “Peter Pan,” the HBO present “Entourage,” Lindsay Lohan, historical Greek drama, voodoo and, in fact, Chekhov. “I’m a wild turkey,” one character says, a riff on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
“I knew I used to be writing a comedy, however for all I knew it may end up comically despairing. I used to be shocked the play was much less bitter than I assumed it might be,” Durang advised the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013.
The Related Press referred to as it “all a bit foolish, a tad daffy and really, very candy,” whereas The New York Instances mentioned “there’s one thing deeply comforting about Durang, of all folks, delivering Chekhov’s misplaced souls from their everlasting distress, if just for one night time.”
In his Tony acceptance speech, Durang famous that he wrote his first play in second grade in 1958. “It has been an extended highway however I am very completely happy to be right here,” he advised the gang.
His different performs included Broadway’s “Past Remedy” — about two therapists making an attempt to counsel two folks in search of love who’re as needy because the sufferers they’re making an attempt to assist — and “The Actor’s Nightmare,” a couple of man pulled from the viewers right into a play he is utterly unfamiliar with.
He was nominated for a Tony for finest ebook of a musical in 1978 for “A Historical past of the American Movie” — about Hollywood’s Golden Age — and named a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for “Miss Witherspoon” — a couple of girl who needs to die however is regularly reincarnated on Earth.
Eli Browning, the manager director of Aux Canine Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, mentioned in 2010 that Durang made catharsis potential by humor.
″Folks do not wish to be preached at, however in the event you get them to giggle at one thing or at themselves, then you have got an opportunity to sneak the reality in for them to think about,” he advised the Albuquerque Journal.
A New Jersey native, Durang was born to an alcoholic architect and a homemaker — each Catholic. He favored to speak about his first play, written when he was 8. It was a two-page model of an “I Love Lucy” episode and he obtained to forged and direct. Later he wrote a musical with a pal at a Catholic, all-boys prep college.
Durang attended Harvard School, learning below William Alfred, and the Yale Faculty of Drama, the place he was taught by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and met Weaver, with whom he wrote and co-starred within the satiric cabaret “Das Lusitania Songspiel” and who went on to star in a lot of his performs.
Durang was co-chair of The Juilliard Faculty’s playwrights program since its inception, in 1994, with Marsha Norman and has additionally taught at Yale and Princeton. He retired from his place at Juilliard in spring 2016. His college students included playwrights Stephen Belber and David Lindsay-Abaire. The latter took over for him at Juilliard.
Durang’s different Broadway credit embody “All About Me” in 2010 and “Intercourse and Longing” in 1996. He additionally wrote screenplays for such movies as “The Adventures of Lola” and “The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance.” He was a employees author for “Carol and Robin and Whoopi and Carl” in 1985.
He was additionally an actor, together with his first talking position being a put-upon govt in Herbert Ross’ “The Secret of My Success” starring Michael J. Fox. Durang was an everyday on a 2001 sitcom referred to as “Kristin,” starring Kristin Chenoweth. He additionally acted reverse Debra Monk in 2005 in a revival of “Laughing Wild” at The Huntington Theater in Boston.
In 2000, he gained the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award. A yr later, he gained an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, he gained the celebrated three-year Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award; as a part of his grant, he ran a writing workshop for grownup kids of alcoholics. Over his profession, he gained three playwrighting Obie awards.
He’s survived by his husband, John Augustine.
