Durang Turns Savage Wit on His Own Family in ‘Boo’

If one knows Christopher Durang from his plays, a face-to-face meeting is a bit of a shocker. There’s not an ounce of wickedness or mania in the mild-mannered, cherubic-faced fellow who offers a smile and a shy hand in greeting, no hint of outrageousness in his conversation. This is a nice Catholic boy from Jersey: neat, courteous, modest, thoughtful. The nuns would be proud.

But look at his plays!

In “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” (L.A. Stage Company, 1982), Durang gave us a steely-eyed, pistol-toting nun not averse to gunning down mouthy students. In “Baby With the Bathwater” (Coronet Theatre, 1985), a woman discovers that her large dog has eaten her baby. In “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” (opening tonight at Los Angeles Theatre Center), a series of stillbirths are noted by a doctor who announces each time, “The baby’s dead,” and drops it on the floor.

If Durang’s savage comic theatrics are as off-the-wall as usual, his subject matter isn’t. For the first time, it’s his own family--specifically, his late parents’ marriage.

“Many of the characters’ major major problems were my parents’, namely alcoholism on his part and an unfortunate blood incompatibility that caused stillbirths,” he said. (His parents separated when he was 13 and divorced when he was in college.) Also on board are Boo’s parents, Carl and Soot (“a really dreadful relationship”), Bette’s mother and father and two sisters (“one who’s very bitter; the other really sweet but totally out to lunch”), a parish priest and narrator Matt, who the writer admits is “kind of nakedly an author figure.”

Durang, 40, began the play 14 years ago while a student at Yale Drama School. After a one-act student staging, he put it away. One issue was that his parents were still alive. “Another,” he said with a shrug, “was that I didn’t feel ready.” After his mother’s cancer death in 1979, he began writing again. (His father died last year after being incapacitated for many years by a stroke). In 1985, the now-full-length version was presented at New York’s Public Theatre--with Durang playing Matt. Said he: “It was sort of a blunt way of acknowledging the personal aspect of the play. I liked doing it.”

The acting foray wasn’t unique. He has also appeared in the films “Mr. North,” “Secret of My Success” and the upcoming “Penn & Teller Get Killed.” He had earlier planned to reprise his role as Matt at LATC--until a screen writing assignment took precedence. “I do sporadic acting--when it presents itself,” he said. But writing has always been the primary passion. “Even when I was little, I tended to write plays. My parents took me to a lot of musicals, which I think affected my work in a way: short scenes that move around fast. When I was in grammar school, I wrote tiny plays with music. One was called ‘Banned in Boston,’ about two spinster aunts trying to shut down a local variety show they thought was offensive. Given my publicity later with ‘Sister Mary,’ it was kind of prophetic.”

Durang was referring to the highly publicized hoopla accompanying the play’s 1982 stagings in Boston and St. Louis; accused of an “anti-Catholic” bias, “Sister Mary” was picketed and denounced by the local church and some city officials.

“I was surprised,” he said. “Frankly, I thought people would agree with me about the play.” He laughed. “There’s a specificity about it that has to be acknowledged. I don’t think I’m saying that (all) Catholic nuns are evil. I’m saying the dogma that was taught to children, particularly in the ‘50s, was extremely simple-minded and caused all sorts of problems.”

After Durang’s initial surprise passed, some anger set in.

“I was writing about what I knew, what I’d gone through,” he said tartly. “I thought, ‘I’m not allowed to criticize telling children they’ll go to hell if they eat meat on Friday?’ Also, among the things the nuns taught me as a little boy was that communism was very bad because they didn’t let you go to church--and they didn’t let you say what you thought. So even from the nuns I got a sense that America was a place where you’re allowed to say what you think.” (The sisters also figure in Durang’s unproduced screenplay, “The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance.”)

The experience wasn’t all bad. “Sister Mary” won an Obie, bolstered his career and heightened his visibility. At what age? “Let see. It was ‘81, and I was born in ’49.” He stopped, a truly puzzled look filling his face. “Was I 32? Really? So, I was 32 then.”

He had already been through the mill a few years earlier with a New York staging of his “Titanic,” which was performed with “Das Lusitania Songspiel,” a musical curtain-raiser by him and Sigourney Weaver (“I always drop her name because we went to Yale together--but we really are friends”). “Though our musical piece went well, ‘Titanic’ got really horrific reviews--like ‘This person can’t write at all,’ ‘How could he get a degree from Yale?’ and ‘We hope we never see him again.’ ”

Durang bounced back with “A History of the American Film” (Taper, 1977), “Beyond Therapy” (Coronet, 1984, and South Coast Repertory, 1987) and “Baby With the Bathwater.”

His newest play, “Laughing Wild,” about an unbalanced woman ricocheting around New York (“She’s already crazy. We just watch her get more crazy”) ran last year at Playwrights Horizons. Now he is at work on a screenplay for director Herbert Ross, “The Adventures of Lola,” about an actress “totally fed up with New York and New York theater, and her struggles and travails.”

More nutty characters. Same calm Chris. “Often in my plays, it gets very confrontational. I find that hard to do in life.

“In life, my behavior is much more avoidance-oriented. It’s not always good, but it’s what I need to do. When I was young, particularly, nothing was ever solved by confrontation. It seemed to escalate into a nuclear affair. My family role was to be the reasoned one. So I became a little adult rather quickly. I would try--in polite ways--to make suggestions that would calm people down. Yeah, a peacemaker.”