STAGE REVIEW : Durang’s ‘Laughing Wild’ Explains It All for You at Tiffany

Somehow you knew, in the self-satisfied leer she offered at the end of Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” that we hadn’t heard the last of Sister Mary.

She herself is not back, but her spirit is, in Durang’s “Laughing Wild,” which opened Saturday at the Tiffany Theatre. This series of monologues, sparked by an incident in the canned tuna fish aisle of the supermarket, explains it all for us. Here we discover what happened to Sister Mary’s little boys and girls when they grew up and entered the real world.

Nothing good.

“Laughing Wild,” a phrase taken from Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” (who took it from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,”) is the sound of one mind slipping. The phrase and the laughter are used over and over by this angry and nameless young woman in Durang’s play, in her effort to cope.

That she lives in New York may not be her fault, but you can see how it compounds the problem. So does the fact that the author neglected to name her. That must make her feel like a real nobody. As she never tires of telling us, she hates everybody: Mother Theresa, Sally Jessy Raphael (“Who is Sally Jesse Raphael? does anybody know? . . .”), A. A., Dr. Ruth Westheimer and, in due course, the Infant of Prague. One can say this for her: She’s an equal-opportunity hater.

She has the misfortune (or perhaps he has the misfortune) of meeting an equally nameless young man in the market’s tuna fish section. Because he’s in her way and taking too long about it, she knocks him down with a tuna fish can. That’s not giving away important plot points, because it’s the first thing this woman tells us, repeating it several times thereafter.

The incident merely unleashes the play: a garrulous recounting of events peppered with free associations that stream from her consciousness and may send her right back to Creedmoor. No, that’s not the school where Sister Mary teaches, but close. It’s the mental institution where this non-coper has already completed three involuntary semesters.

Through his own set of free associations, we eventually get to know the young man that this woman attacked almost as well as we know her. He’s at least as peculiar. But instead of laughing wild as she does, he smiles a lot. He’s the type who goes in for affirmations of life, such as the Harmonic Convergence and other feel-good therapies. Up to a point. He too loves to tell all about his insecurities, his sexual ambivalence, his fear for the ozone layer and that terrifying woman he met at the store.

As with “Sister Ignatius,” Durang gives minimal structure to “Laughing Wild,” which consists of his-and-her monologues in Act I and crossover nightmares in Act II, and which is not immune to repetitiveness. Essentially, it’s a great excuse for him to hilariously air his personal beefs and skewer his personal demons through this hapless pair of blundering alter egos. You can all but taste the glee with which they tear down all known inconsistencies of the modern world--from its broader existential senselessness to its more diurnal absurdities.

“Wild’s” barbs are savagely, consistently on target, though at some serious risk of self-defeat. The play’s references to figures of such fleeting celebrity as Westheimer, Phil Donahue or Tony Orlando and Dawn, and even to such events as the Harmonic Convergence, may not mean much some 20 or more years from now. Or less.

On the bigger issues, there is no such concern. Even more than in “Sister Mary,” formalized religion is in for it. It takes a good Catholic boy like Durang to feel as rabidly anti-Christian as he does. When his target isn’t God himself, it is everything God has wrought or neglected to prevent, such as the Holocaust, the freedom of sexual choice, famine and AIDS. Clearly, if you are a true believer, this play is not for you.

Dennis Erdman directed “Wild,” without entirely solving its major flaw: a tendency to overdo. Funny is always funnier in short, sharp stings.

Jean Smart and playwright Durang himself, in his first Los Angeles stage appearance, play the woman and man--and astutely, though, even disheveled, Smart seems a little too gorgeously together for someone who is laughing wild on the brink. But her laugh--a raucous, back-of-the-throat wild howl, like a saxophone gone awry--is not easy to forget.

As for Durang, who stepped in as the young man when Harry Groener bowed out over “artistic differences,” he has the wry, cherubic demeanor of an aging choir-boy. It’s perfect casting. He and Smart make mincemeat of false piety and modern existence by standing as physical opposites to the thoughts they deliver. “Laughing Wild,” structurally flawed as it is (and no more so than “Sister Mary”), is forgiven almost all its transgressions for providing grand satire--a rara avis in a post-Reagan world that is licking its wounds.

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