The Theatre of Christopher Durang by Miriam M. Chirico (review)

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• The Theatre of Christopher Durang by Miriam M. Chirico
• Amy S. Osatinski

THE THEATRE OF CHRISTOPHER DURANG. By Miriam M. Chirico. Methuen Drama Critical Companions. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2020; pp. 234.

Christopher Durang's works have opened on Broadway, and he's won the Tony Award for Best Play and been nominated for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Additionally, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Yet, as Miriam Chirico points out, "very little scholarship exists about Durang's theatrical oeuvre, considering the vast amount of plays he's contributed to the American theatre repertory" (214). In The Theatre of Christopher Durang, she begins to remedy this omission by attempting to provide comprehensive coverage of the playwright's work in a single volume.

In the introduction, Chirico weaves together biographical facts and anecdotes with examples from Durang's plays, illustrating instances where his life visibly influenced his work. This setup promises further exploration into the connection between the playwright's life and his plays. This is an exciting prospect, given Durang's background as a queer former Catholic––two identities that notably shape his plays. Following the introduction, however, the book shifts its focus and prioritizes the themes of the plays above their connection to the author's identities, diverting from the initial promise of a deeper exploration into how Durang's personal background influences his work.

The introduction also serves as a primer on the genre of Dark Comedy, offering a framework for understanding Durang's plays through their comedic structure. This exploration proves fruitful and necessary for contextualizing the plays, as most of Durang's work is characterized by its wild humor along with elements of the grotesque, darkness, and offense. Comedic theory is a welcome framework for further exploration when Durang's œuvre is examined collectively, and its consistent inclusion throughout the rest of the text would have strengthened the volume even more.

The body of the text is organized thematically, grouping plays into five categories across five chapters. Chapter 1, "Perverting the Classics," examines Durang's plays that parody classic works of literature and drama. Chirico observes that Durang often deliberately "misreads" his source material, resulting in "an all-out war, a barbaric yawp in the stoic face the classics" (21). Rather than approaching his parodies with reverence or homage, Durang tears them apart and the results are "riotously funny" (21). The chapter analyzes several of Durang's parodies, uncovering his penchant for "joyful bloodletting" of the classic works he targets (22).

Chapters 2, 4, and 5 continue to analyze Durang's works through a thematic lens: chapter 2, "Seeking is Believing," explores religious themes; chapter 4, "Family Dysfunction," explores marriage and family; and chapter 5, "American Anomie," discusses works that are connected to US culture. Each illuminates the ways in which Durang's plays engage in "joyful bloodletting" of cultural institutions in a similar way to how his parodies lampoon literary classics. Chirico observes that the Catholic Church, the US American family, and the media are all put under Durang's comedic microscope. These chapters include detailed discussions of a few of his plays, offering keen observations about the impact of Durang's personal experience on their writing. For example, chapter 4 opens with an excellent and concise discussion of the prevalent propaganda about the US American family in the mid-twentieth century and then briefly connects Durang's experience of growing up in that era to several of his plays.

In chapter 3, the discussion shifts to Durang's numerous one-act plays and includes an exploration of his early 1990s nightclub act, Christopher Durang and Dawne. Notably, this chapter is the most expansive, encompassing all the themes explored throughout the other chapters. Due to the [End Page 403] breadth of content, however, none of the short plays mentioned is studied with depth. The plays in this chapter could have filled an entire volume themselves, underscoring the wide-ranging impact of Durang's contributions to the genre of US American short plays. Like all books in Methuen's Critical Companions series, The Theatre of Christopher Durang also presents two critical perspectives on its subject's work, this time...