Word: durang
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...Christopher Durang...
Parody is Christopher Durang's native element. He can mimic and spoof manners, trends and styles of speaking in ways that inflict the sting of truth just as surely as those of a good caricaturist. But Durang tends to end his plays unconvincingly, in a spasm of violence, as if he had been brooding on deeper things all along-like, say, man's fate. It is as if the playwright as jester suddenly dropped his mask and wished to be acknowledged as a thinker. These two one-acters at Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons Theater display both Durang...
...students do scenes, you know. It was so clinical you could hardly look at it. It was like looking into somebody's life." Lewis also marvels at Meryl's range. He recalls her flying about in a wheelchair, playing a crazy, octogenarian translator of Russian literature in a Christopher Durang play. "It was really the most imaginative farcical performance I've ever seen...
Somewhere about 1942, for example, the play stops at Now, Voyager and the famous love scene in which Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to Bette Davis. Durang's Henreid standin, a duplicate of double-breasted elegance, suavely does the same, but his Bette Davis is hilariously different. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't smoke." The vision" of Henreid nervously puffing two cigarettes is a small jewel of farce...
...spring, playgoers in three cities will have had a chance to hear Durang's words. The play had its premiere at the Hartford Stage Com pany in March. A totally different pro duction, with a separate cast and an other director, was unveiled at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles last month; even while that is still running, a third, also different version will open this week at Washington's Arena Stage...