CHRISTOPHER DURANG
CHRISTOPHER DURANG
I never thought of myself as a political writer. I actually wrote The Vietnamization of New Jersey as a parody of David Rabe’s play Stick and Bones, which is about a young man coming home from Vietnam. Later, when I wrote Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, I didn’t think of that as political either; I was just writing about what I’d been taught growing up. After the play was really very well received, I started to learn that there was a backlash, and some conservative people were offended, and picketed, and didn’t want any tax money to go to a theatre that put on the play. Phil Donahue did a whole show about it!
I got my MFA partially so I could teach, but for so much of my career I was busy with productions, and then teaching would never come up. Once I was a guest teacher, but I found it stressful in that I was in a room with playwrights I hadn’t chosen. I didn’t want to be discouraging or harsh, but I found it stressful to figure out what I had to say if I didn’t like something. Well, this job at Juilliard came up, and I was offered the position of co-teaching with Marsha Norman. We had a magical first year. We found out we got on great, and we adored our students. Sometimes we would even bring in things we were working on, if there was no other work that week —I found their responses to be really helpful. I brought in early drafts of Betty’s Summer Vacation and Why Torture is Wrong for my students to read and talk about.
CAROLINE A whole talk show dedicated to a play? Sounds like another planet…
CAROLINE CHRISTOPHER DURANG I did do a clever thing. They wanted to show footage from the St. Louis version of the show. I said Donahue could only do it with footage from the California production, because it was a really great production—that way I knew it was a good clip of my work—and once the show aired, the box office went up in New York, L.A., and San Francisco. (He laughs, a little diabolically.) Every time they went to a clip, the audience would laugh! One audience member said, “I know he shouldn’t be saying those things, but I laughed.” The protests to the play—which later happened in Boston as well—became an early harbinger of the culture wars. It got bomb threats in Florida and was canceled in Detroit. Pat Buchanan said it was the most “bigoted anti-Catholic thing that anyone had ever written.”
CAROLINE That is a bold statement.
I would love to know what you think about playwriting in general. Or playwriting as it is right now. Or playwriting as it used to be. Or, I mean, well, anything about the state of playwriting?
CHRISTOPHER DURANG I sometimes feel that I don’t have a very theoretical mind. So if somebody says to me, “What do you see as the latest trends in theatre?” I sort of don’t have an answer. So I find that in terms of beliefs about playwriting, I don’t have lots of them.
CAROLINE That is strangely comforting. (CHRISTOPHER DURANG smiles and rises, putting out his hand. She shakes it.)
CHRISTOPHER DURANG It’s been really lovely speaking with you. But I have a matinee I have to get to at 2—
CHRISTOPHER DURANG I sent him flowers. I started to become more political after that experience—there were lots of tax payers who did like my play. Later, during the George W. Bush presidency, I found listening to him to be so enraging I would shout at the TV screen, scaring my dog. The way he manipulated the truth fits the term “dry drunk” in AA—someone who is sober, but not psychologically improved. I grew up with a lot of manipulative alcoholics, so I didn’t trust him. I started to read obsessively about politics. I used to go to the theatre pages first and now I go to the Op/Ed pages. My writing for The Huffington Post came out of the blue, during the run of Miss Witherspoon. Arianna Huffington is mentioned in the play, in a passing joke about reincarnation. One day after a matinee, I checked my voicemail and this voice said, “Hello, this is Arianna Huffington.” I thought it was my partner, John, because he’s very good at imitations, but it was her! I felt like I was being offered a soapbox—an outlet for my political frustrations.
CAROLINE You know, if this were one of your plays, something crazy would happen right now. Like maybe a housewife would drop from the ceiling and start listing every pet she’s ever had in alphabetical order. Or maybe the room would split open and reveal an underground cave.
CHRISTOPHER DURANG (Kindly.) This isn’t a play, though, Caroline. (He gathers his things and exits. Caroline is left alone. She packs up her computer and electronic recording device and exits, shutting off the lights. Silence in the room. The floor splits open, revealing an underground cave. A housewife crawls out of the cave, holding an alphabetical list of every pet she’s ever owned. She looks around, disappointed, for someone to talk to. She shrugs, descends back into the cave. The floor repairs itself. )
CAROLINE
* * * The End
You teach, too. Does that inform your own writing?
YSD 2010–11
29