Of ‘Mess’ and Men

‘A Mess of Plays,” the new compilation of a dozen short theater pieces by Christopher Durang, opened Friday at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. It is directed by David Chambers, who describes the production on the SCR Second Stage as “the weaving together of a mad cabaret-video-variety show whose subject happens to be America.” The pieces span the playwright’s career: The earliest was begun in 1973, though it has been revised since, and the latest was written for this production. Six of the pieces have never been produced. What follows is based on interviews and reporting done during rehearsals for “A Mess of Plays.”

SCENE 1

(Christopher Durang is standing outside the International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach. Behind and above him is a giant mural showing three surfers riding the waves. The ocean is painted blue-green against a sky of deeper blue. It is drizzling. Durang holds open a black umbrella, slightly tattered. Next to him is a palm tree.

He holds a mike. He is wearing a parka over his blue blazer. A video crew from South Coast Repertory is hunched at console equipment draped in a makeshift blanket of shiny black trash bags. Durang is being taped for an unrehearsed man-on-the-street interview, to be inserted into “A Mess of Plays.” Director David Chambers is standing by.)

Durang (to camera): Hello. Here I am in sunny Southern California. Let me see if I do any better here than I did in New York.

(Brief wait.)

Durang (to passerby): Have you heard of Arthur Miller?

Pedestrian (stops): No.

Durang: Tennessee Williams?

Pedestrian: No.

Durang: Christopher Durang?

Pedestrian: No.

Durang: You haven’t heard of Christopher Durang?

Pedestrian: No.

Durang: Have you ever seen a play?

Pedestrian: No.

(He shuffles off.)

Durang (waves): Thank you.

Chambers (to Reporter): Chris did this at Lincoln Center and Times Square.

Reporter: Any better luck?

Chambers: The day was brighter.

SCENE 2

(The previous evening in Costa Mesa. A cozy booth at a small, bustling Italian restaurant. The din of conversations and clinking silverware is too loud for comfort. Durang--in same blazer, no tie--does not seem to notice. He has an innocent face: delicate nose, blue eyes, shock of thick gray hair. His manner is gentle, sincere. He gives the impression that even at 47 he could be an altar boy.)

Reporter: You named a character Ferdinand in one of your plays. Isn’t that your middle name?

Durang: Yes. What a weird name. My father’s name is Francis Ferdinand. He took a dislike to Francis, so he fastened on Ferdinand. I hardly ever use it.

Reporter: Your plays thrive on self-revelation. Everything is personal in them.

Durang: I think that’s true.

Reporter: So what happened? All of a sudden you disappeared. You fell off the radar screen--in, what, 1987?

Durang: Yes, I know what you mean totally.

Reporter: Did self-revelation become too difficult?

Durang: Why did I stop writing? (Pause.) I think in retrospect it was a lot of things. I really got phobic about New York criticism. It was cumulative. I’d had a run of plays there almost every other year. After being embraced by the New York Times and [then-theater critic] Frank Rich and all of that, I felt really lucky. I felt my career would keep going.

(Lights down.)

SCREEN MONTAGE WITH VOICE-OVER

Voice (Dan Rather-ish): When Christopher Durang burst onto Broadway in 1978, he was four years out of the Yale School of Drama. Before that, Harvard. He was already a prolific writer with a trunkful of wickedly satirical plays, more than a dozen produced.

Montage: Vintage scenes from Durang’s early productions--”When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth” (written with Wendy Wasserstein), “Das Lusitania Songspiel” (written and performed with Sigourney Weaver), “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe,” “I Don’t Generally Like Poetry, but Have You Read ‘Trees’? “ (written with Albert Innaurato), “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” “Titanic” and “The Vietnamization of New Jersey.”

Voice: Not yet out of his 20s, the New Jersey-born playwright reached Broadway for the first time with “A History of the American Film,” a musical. David Chambers directed. “History” originally had simultaneous premieres at the Mark Taper Forum, the Hartford Stage in Connecticut and, also under Chambers’ direction, at the Arena Stage in Washington. The show was a runaway hit in the nation’s capital. Theirs was a happy first collaboration.

(Lights up. The restaurant again.)

Durang: “History” didn’t go quite as well on Broadway. We all made mistakes. The theater wasn’t as good. The reviews were medium.

Reporter: But you were a rising star. Compared to most playwrights, a grand success.

Durang: How one defines success is the question. Success changes. One way I viewed success was for different plays to have New York runs. Not every single one, you know what I mean.

Reporter: Why did you stop writing?

Durang: I wasn’t quite as inactive as it seemed. What I did was just less public, and it tended not to be in New York. Also, it was the beginning of the end for my mother. . . .

(Lights down.)

SCREEN MONTAGE WITH VOICE-OVER

Voice (Peter Jennings-ish): Nationwide notoriety clapped Durang on the back in 1979. With a Tony Award nomination already to his credit--for the book of “History”--he wrote what would become his best-known play: “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.” The original show went up at a tiny theater off-off-Broadway. Then Playwrights Horizons did it, also in New York. The Catholic Church inveighed against it. “Sister Mary” ran for 18 months at the Las Palmas Theatre in Los Angeles. Its fame spread. Community theaters did it. Protesters picketed, in St. Louis, in Costa Mesa and beyond. But audiences cheered. City councils threw down the gauntlet: No more arts grants. The talk shows put Durang on to explain it all. He was touched by celebrity.

Montage: Vintage scenes from different productions of “Sister Mary.” Headlines. Demonstrations. Police lines. Angry faces. Durang being hounded by reporters; getting out of cabs, planes, trains; getting off rural buses on dusty roads; Durang seen on “Entertainment Tonight”; clips from “The Phil Donahue Show.”

SCENE 3

(Lights up on restaurant. The food has come. Durang and Reporter both eating salmon with pasta.)

Durang: Then I did “Beyond Therapy.” (Pause.) We did it off-Broadway with Sigourney and on Broadway with Dianne Wiest. The New York Times didn’t like it. (Pause.) Frank Rich didn’t like it, and then Walter Kerr didn’t like it. They really put the kibosh on the Broadway version. I took it in stride. I thought, “You win some, you lose some.” The next year or so I did “Baby With the Bathwater,” and that was strange. Rich sort of gave it a good review. But I’ll tell you, he liked “Baby” more than the audiences did. “Beyond Therapy” was a crowd-pleaser. “Baby” troubled people. I began to think he was out of touch.

Anyway, the one that did it for me was “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” at the Public [in 1985]. We had a great cast--Joan Allen, Mercedes Ruehl. Jerry Zaks directed. We won Obie Awards for the play and the cast. It was really good, and it had a lot of emotion in it because it’s basically about my parents. The reviews were mostly good, except Frank Rich wrote the first one. It was not a killer. It didn’t say: “He has no talent.” But he made it sound like it was a chore to sit through. You know, “We’ve seen all this before.” Even Joe Papp said to me, “If we didn’t get Frank’s review, we would have moved it.”

Reporter: For an extended run.

Durang: Yes. So then I started to be depressed about it. I didn’t actually make a decision to quit writing plays. I thought, “Maybe I can do more movies.” Because I’d been writing screenplays--without much luck.

SCENE 4

(The next morning. A chain restaurant. It’s almost empty. The breakfast crowd has gone. David Chambers is having scrambled eggs and hashed-brown potatoes. He is wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap. A pair of glasses hangs against his chest on a black shoelace around his neck. He seems preoccupied. He has been going over the rehearsal schedule. Neatly stacked notebooks and papers sit by his plate. Reporter is having toast and coffee.)

Chambers (expatiating): As I’ve said over the years to my directing students back at Yale, “You’re lucky if in a lifetime you connect with two playwrights who you really feel you’re on a wavelength with.” I feel that kind of connection with Chris.

(Pause.)

Chambers: Chris got hit by something I’ve seen others who made it big early get hit with. Chris had a billboard in Times Square--if you will--saying: “Here is the next genius.” And that’s not an easy chair to sit in. Any artist lives with the hidden terror that this time they’re going to find me out, that somehow it’s all done with smoke and mirrors, that whatever I did to achieve acclaim was an accident or the phases of the moon happened to be lined up right, and can I ever get that back? It’s a terrifying experience. But I disagree with F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are second acts in American life. I’m looking for Michael Cimino to come back.

Reporter: And Durang?

Chambers: This is Durang’s second act. Chris kept writing. But he was not driving himself forward in the theater. Now I think he is. He’s very eager to be back.

(Lights down.)

VIDEO PROJECTION

(A large screen. Durang is seen again in front of the Surfing Museum. It’s still drizzling. He looks at the camera, about to do another man-on-the-street interview. This time, however, Chambers comes moping along in full baseball regalia: hat and jacket, glasses on.)

Durang (thrusts mike at him): Have you heard of Arthur Miller?

Chambers (comes to abrupt stop): Is he on TV? I don’t watch much TV.

Durang: How about Tennessee Williams?

Chambers: Yeah, I think so.

Durang: Lope de Vega?

Chambers (brightens): Yes. Spanish playwright. Sixteenth century.

Durang: So you know older drama. Beaumont and Fletcher?

Chambers: Yes, yes. “Knight of the Burning Pestle.” That’s a very funny one actually. Very funny.

Durang: Christopher Durang?

Chambers: He’s not that funny. Beaumont and Fletcher are better. Who did you say?

Durang (grins and bears it): Christopher Durang?

Chambers: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m thinking of David Mamet. Durang? I don’t think I know him. Wait. Is he a recovering Catholic?

Durang: I don’t know about the recovering part. But yes, he’s a Catholic. Raised Catholic.

Chambers: It rings a bell. It does ring a bell. Uhm, where are you from?

Durang: South Coast Repertory.

Chambers: Where’s that?

Durang: Costa Mesa?

Chambers: Oh, OK. All right. So it’s right around here somewhere. So we’re OK. OK.

(Chambers shuffles off. Durang continues to stand there, facing the camera looking slightly perplexed.)

SCENE 5

(The Italian restaurant again.)

Reporter: What happened to your mother?

Durang: My mother was a nice person. She was in this constant struggle with my father. I was an uncomfortable witness to their marriage. They separated when I was 13. Once the marriage ended, she suddenly put a spotlight on me. She was very driving, very ambitious for me. Sometimes she would be unreasonable. But luckily she was a nice person. She died of cancer when I was 30. She’d had cancer on and off for about eight years. She lived to see me nominated for a Tony. I didn’t win. But it was very nice.

Reporter: You became depressed?

Durang: For the year that she was super-ill, I could barely write. And I certainly wasn’t making any money. So that was that depression.

Reporter: And after your mother died?

Durang: I wasn’t really recovered. But I was relieved that she died. The last year was just horrific. After she died, I went through a burst of writing. And out of that came “Sister Mary.” To my total surprise, it was this big success. That was a real turnaround. Suddenly I was making a living as a playwright.

(Lights dim on Durang, come up slowly on Chambers over empty breakfast plates. Reporter walks from one restaurant to the other, sits.)

Chambers: Chris writes for actors. Chris is an actor, as you know, and a rather good one. Well, along with writing for actors, there are his concerns. There is no pretending he doesn’t have recurrent obsessions: the church, the family, how the young are molded, how the media and so on shape consciousness. You feel the dislocation of things. There’s anger, fear and forehead-slapping absurdity and a little bit of scorn. But as bizarre as it gets, it’s always logical. And that brew makes for a lacerating humor.

(Lights down.)

SCENE 6

Voice (in the dark): What now?

(Lights up. Durang alone at table, cleared of dishes.)

Durang (to audience): A new play called “Sex and Longing.” I wrote it on commission for Lincoln Center. I finished a draft in the spring of 1995. We had a reading, like, a year ago. It went very well. I was hoping they could do it this year. But, in any case, it’s fine. It’s going to be Lincoln Center Theater’s first show in the fall.

Voice (imperious): When?

Durang (startled, looks upward): Late September. We don’t have the literal date yet. Sigourney is going to be in it. She said she will. We’re working that out now with her shooting schedule for “Alien4.”

Voice (God-like): What is it about?

Durang: Right. It’s mostly about a woman named Lulu. Her friend Justin is there too. And they’re both fairly out of control with their sexuality. It is somewhat surreal, and it is a comedy.

I guess the only other thing about it is that as it goes on it becomes a little more predictable. Lulu gets involved with an evangelical minister, and the minister in turn with the senator’s wife, and they end up using Lulu as an example of moral laxity, and they start trying to amend the Constitution to include more things from the Bible. That’s sort of the arc of the story.

(Long pause.)

Oh, it’ll probably help to understand that in the first scene Lulu has to have sex every 15 minutes and Justin has to have sex every three hours.

(Lights out.)

* “A Mess of Plays,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends May 26. $26-$36. (714) 957-4033.