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...

["The Idiots Karamazov"] is, more or less, a musical comedy based on "The Brothers Karamazov," which is enough to make Dostoyevsky turn over in his grave. Actually there is nothing grave about this antic undertaking. A travesty by Christopher Durang and Albert F. Innaurato,… it is as precocious as it sounds—but it also has moments of comic inspiration…. The script is riddled with literary allusions and intellectual jokes. This is a lampoon not only of Dostoye...

A History of the American Film is a great foolery…. It might also be described as a crazy quilt stitched together by a loose thread of a "story" and a shred of an idea…. The vocabulary of American film, from the early days to more recent ones, is employed with especial reference to various news features or, if you will, historical events of the past sixty years or more. What we see is supposed to be a film (and people watching several different films), but the convention is not s...