Playwright Christopher Durang appears on stage with producers to accept the award for best play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” at the 67th Annual Tony Awards, June 9, 2013, in New York. Also on stage are actors, background from left, Shalita Grant, Kristine Nielsen and Billy Magnussen.
Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
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Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Playwright Christopher Durang appears on stage with producers to accept the award for best play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” at the 67th Annual Tony Awards, June 9, 2013, in New York. Also 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 master of satire and dark comedy who won 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 years old.
Durang died Tuesday at his home in Pipersville, Pa., of complications from primary progressive logopenic aphasia, said his agent, Patrick Herold. In 2022, it was revealed that Durang was diagnosed in 2016 with the condition, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease.
Durang’s plays were imbued with a sense of intelligent, high-octane absurdism. Her works include “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All”, “Baby with the Bathwater”, “Bette and Boo’s Wedding”, “Betty’s Summer Vacation”, and “Mrs. Bob Cratchit.
“I’m one of those people who laughs at unfunny things,” Durang told the crowd at a Dramatists Guild conference in 2013. “If you watch the adults around you make the same mistake 20 times suite, at some point, you I want to jump out of the window or you laugh. I was one of those who laughed.
The playwright arguably had his brightest moment in his career with “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a sweet and witty play inspired by Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters” with a huge appetite for the pop culture that was brought to Broadway with David. Hyde Pierce, Sigourney Weaver and Kristine Nielsen.
It centers on three middle-aged siblings named after Chekhov characters who struggle with age. Two of them – Vanya and Sonia – have been sitting around their Pennsylvania home bickering for years since their parents died. The escaped sister, Masha, became an insufferable movie star and returned to sell the house, leaving her sister and brother with the prospect of being homeless and penniless.
Durang threw all sorts of references into his word processor: Angelina Jolie, Snow White, Maggie Smith, global warming, Norma Desmond, William Penn, “Peter Pan,” the HBO series “Entourage,” Lindsay Lohan, drama ancient Greek, voodoo and, of course, Chekhov. “I’m a wild turkey,” says one character, a riff on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
“I knew I was writing a comedy, but for all I knew it might turn out comically hopeless. I was surprised that the play was less bitter than I thought,” Durang told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013.
The Associated Press called it “all a little silly, a little ridiculous and very, very sweet”, while the New York Times said “there is something deeply comforting about Durang, between all, delivering Chekhov’s lost souls from their eternal misery, if only.” for one night.”
In his Tony acceptance speech, Durang noted that he wrote his first play in third grade in 1958. “It’s been a long road but I’m very happy to be here,” he told the crowd.
His other plays include Broadway’s “Beyond Therapy” — about two therapists trying to counsel two love-seeking people who are as needy as the patients they are trying to help — and “The Actor’s Nightmare,” about a man shot of the public in a room that he doesn’t know at all.
He was nominated for a Tony for Best Musical Book in 1978 for “A History of the American Film” – about Hollywood’s Golden Age – and named a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for “Miss Witherspoon” – about a woman who wishes to die but is continually reincarnated on Earth.
Eli Browning, executive director of Aux Dog Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said in 2010 that Durang made catharsis possible through humor.
“People don’t like to be lectured to, but if you make them laugh at something or at themselves, then you have a chance of making them understand the truth,” he said at the Albuquerque Journal.
Originally from New Jersey, Durang was born to an alcoholic architect and a housewife, both of whom were Catholic. He loved talking about his first play, written when he was 8 years old. It was a two-page version of an episode of “I Love Lucy” and he was able to cast and direct it. He later wrote a musical with a friend at an all-boys Catholic prep school.
Durang attended Harvard College, studying under William Alfred, and the Yale School of Drama, where he was taught by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and met Weaver, with whom he wrote and performed in the satirical cabaret “Das Lusitania Songspiel” and who continued to perform in several of his plays.
Durang has served as co-chair of the Juilliard School’s playwriting program since its inception in 1994 with Marsha Norman and has also taught at Yale and Princeton. He retired from his position at Juilliard in the spring of 2016. His students included playwrights Stephen Belber and David Lindsay-Abaire. The latter succeeds him at Juilliard.
Durang’s other Broadway credits include “All About Me” in 2010 and “Sex and Longing” in 1996. He also wrote screenplays for films such as “The Adventures of Lola” and “The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance.” He was an editor for “Carol and Robin and Whoopi and Carl” in 1985.
He was also an actor, his first speaking role being that of an executive in Herbert Ross’s “The Secret of My Success” starring Michael J. Fox. Durang was a regular on the 2001 sitcom “Kristin,” starring Kristin Chenoweth. He also starred alongside Debra Monk in a 2005 revival of “Laughing Wild” at the Huntington Theater in Boston.
In 2000, he won the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award. A year later, he won a literature prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, he won the prestigious three-year Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award; as part of his fellowship, he led a writing workshop for adult children of alcoholics. During his career, he won three Obie Playwright Awards.
He is survived by his husband, John Augustine.
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