The people in Christopher Durang's play "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" are not a happy lot. They suffer. The husband, from alcoholism. The wife, from a succession of stillborn children, from her husband, and from an inability to perceive reality. A grandfather, from...

Christopher Durang's "Betty's Summer Vacation," a comedy about a beach-house time share gone more wrong than you might have believed possible, is bitter and overlong but undeniably hilarious. And in the Studio Theatre production that opened Sunday, J.R. Sullivan has exuberantly directed an all-lunatic...

All of Harley Granville-Barker’s great Edwardian plays are about moral corruption, which accounts for the run of timely revivals. In 1999, the excellent Mint Theater Company staged Barker’s drama about financial greed and hypocrisy, The Voysey Inheritance—the same play that David Mamet recently adapted. Now,...

For nearly 30 years, theater audiences knew Wendy Wasserstein as the wry mistress of wit who could make them guffaw in their seats or wheeze until they wept. But to her friends, the essence of this Broadway scribe was always her own high-pitched giggle. “It...

Christopher Durang is a young playwright out of Harvard and Yale who took the wrong turn at some point and wound up in comedy. While his contemporaries were grimly exploring the Vietnam experience or urban bleakness or poking through the ashes of burned-out lives, Durang was busy collaborating on a send-up of Dostoevski called The Idiots Karamazov. He was also turning out deliciously titled comedies like When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, and The Vietnamization of New ...

[The Vietnamization of New Jersey] is a satire of such ferocity that it runs roughshod not only through the conventions of [David Rabe's] Sticks and Bones, but through some of our most cherished liberal illusions. Durang is a lineal descendant of Lenny Bruce, which is to say he is always trespassing on forbidden ground, skirting perilously close to nihilism. Still, Durang's nihilism is earned; like Bruce, he obviously suffers for it. The satire in The Vietnamization of New Jersey has been call...

The idea of A History of the American Film must have seemed enchanting to its young author, Christopher Durang. It takes a few basic characters right through the typical genre movies—and others—from Intolerance to Earthquake. There is Loretta, the sweet girl from the orphanage, whom every kind of evil befalls without making her shed her innocence. She is part Loretta Young, part Sade's Justine, and wholly in love with Jimmy, who goes from Jimmy Cagney to Bogart, from Jimmy Dean to Brand...