Christopher Durang

An Interview by Randy Gener

Roundabout readies a revival of The Marriage of Bette and Boo, a classic 1980s comedy by one of America's most mordant comic playwrights.

Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boois a memory play about family life-as perhaps written by the loony child of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Matt, the narrator, weaves in and out of the action of his life story, commenting on his eccentric family members, including those eponymous parents. Add two sets of grandparents and some siblings and you have a very fragile, cracked Glass Menagerie, revealed in 33 short scenes.

Has anybody ever written a more remorselessly dark comic play about marriages, miscarriages, alcoholism, and divorce? How dark? Well, after Matt's grandfather farcically chokes to death on a piece of birthday cake, his body stays onstage, a sheet over its head, for the reminder of the play. There's also the scene where Matt's mother, Bette, watches bemusedly as a doctor arrives to deliver her babies, wrapped in a blanket (all but the first are dead) and casually drops them on the floor. Ross Wetzsteon in The Best of Off-Broadway: 8 Contemporary Obie-winning Plays called The Marriage of Bette and Boo “a kind of ‘Ozzie and Harriet's Journey Into Night.”

Born in 1949 in Montclair, New Jersey, Durang was reared in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, the only one of his parents' four children to be born alive. His father, whose real nickname is indeed Boo, was an architect and an alcoholic. His mother (whose nickname was altered for the play) did have stillbirths (though Durang added an extra one in the play). Although Durang also acts and sings (he played Matt for the Public Theater production in 1985), he's best known as the playwright of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, A History of American Film, Beyond Therapy, Betty's Summer Vacation, and Miss Witherspoon, among other works. He was one of the many extraordinary talents to come out of Yale School of Drama in 1970s. In the original one-act version the young Meryl Streep played the bitter sister Joan; Sigourney Weaver, took on Soot, Boo's mother. Director Jerry Zaks's Public Theater production, which starred Joan Allen as Bette, Mercedes Ruehl as Joan, and Olympia Dukakis as Soot, earned Obies for playwriting, direction, scenic design, and ensemble acting.

Roundabout Theatre Company's new production, opening in June at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, reunites Durang with director Walter Bobbie (Chicago) who in 1994 staged an evening of six one-acts, including For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls.

FRONT & CENTER: Is The Marriage of Bette and Boo still your favorite play?

CHRISTOPHER DURANG: I guess it is, but I would add to it by saying that I also feel closer to Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Miss Witherspoon. Bette and Boo is the only play of mine that is directly autobiographical about my parents' marriage and my place in it. And, of all my plays, it's the only one that has this odd combination of exaggerated (or heightened) comedy and real emotions. You can argue that Miss Witherspoon has that blend, too, but because the setting of that play takes place in the afterworld, it's already so distanced. It's not quite the same as Bette and Boo, which occurs in the real world of marriage, parenting, and alcoholism. When the Public Theater first produced the play in 1985, one of the favorite remarks I got from a stranger was this letter from a psychiatrist who said, “My God, you captured the alcoholic family exactly, correctly.” I felt vindicated.

Bette and Boo started as a one-act at the Yale School of Drama. Your friend, the playwright Albert Innaurato, who had heard these family anecdotes you told, suggested that you write a play based on them.

I forget that this is true, because I don't tell “funny” stories about my family anymore. They were often somewhat dark stories. My friendships with Albert, Wendy Wasserstein, and other friends in college were based on exchanging our psychological histories. It was part of our getting to know one another. While in grad school, Albert and I were accepted for a month's stay at the Edward Albee Writers Foundation in Montauk, Long Island. I was having a writer's block. Albert said, “Why don't you write about your family?” So I did as an exercise. When I handed in what I wrote to my playwriting teacher, Howard Stein, I just wanted him to see what I had written over the summer. I thought I had written a number of one-act plays that couldn't be done by the school. It didn't cross my mind that he would show it to a director, who suddenly said he wanted to work on a full production of it. In the small world of the Yale School of Drama, getting a director to do a play in a real production was a big deal.

I love the fact you used real names of people in that earlier version.

Yeah. It was a bit jarring to change the names when it got produced in school. Bette and Boo was later done at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, St. Nicholas Theatre Company in Chicago, and finally Princeton, New Jersey. I had decided to not let my mother know about this particular play, because I wasn't sure if it would upset her, given the fact that she actually had stillbirths, and the play makes reference to them in a way that is meant to be ultimately empathetic but is initially heightened and surreal. Princeton was fairly far from where my mother lived in New Jersey. I didn't see why she would hear about a college production-but for some reason she did.

I tried to talk her out of going. She said she wanted to go see the play. Then I was just honest to her in advance and explained that I was worried she might be upset about the references to still births, and the fact that the play's treatment of them was comic. I'm pretty sure I sent her the script so she could look at it before seeing the play. The part of this story I really like is that my mother really liked the play when she first saw it. She liked it for three reasons. She said she thought I got the other characters in my family very well. The second reason is that she had a good sense of humor. The other reason, I think, is that she was thrilled that she was the leading character in the play. (Laughs)

Did you decide to expand the play after the Princeton production?

I did think to myself, “It's very hard to go further with a one act that has ten characters.” So I stopped letting anybody do the one act. I felt somewhere down the line that if anyone was going to produce a play with ten characters then it had better be a full evening. I put the play aside; it's the only time I've ever done this with a play. Somewhere between five and seven years passed. During that time my mother had cancer, then a remission and then the occurrence of death-unfortunately all of which became part of the play. It wasn't until after she had died that I went back to the play. I am happy she had seen the play; it ended up making me feel that I had her blessing.

How did it happen that Joseph Papp asked you to play the role of Matt in the 1985 premiere at the Public Theater?

I was aware that Matt was a stand-in for me, just as Tom stood in as the young Tennessee in The Glass Menagerie. In the one-act version of Bette and Boo, Matt revealed much less about himself; there were very few scenes where he interacted with his parents. I brought the full-length version to the Public in 1982 or 1983. We had a reading of it, which went well, but Joe wasn't exactly ready to do it. He did give me rewrite suggestions, some of which I took. During several readings, somebody else always read Matt. But a director I was working with, who organized another reading for Papp, had seen me act in Das Lusitania Songspiel [a Brecht-Weill parody which Durang performed with Sigourney Weaver], so he asked me to do the reading. I think it went well, but Joe still wasn't ready to do the play. The quirky thing about Joe is that he didn't go to lots of theatre outside of the Public, but he happened to see me act twice. So when he did decide to do Bette and Boo, and I had a meeting with him, he surprised me and said, “I think you should do Matt.”

Looking back at the whole experience of The Marriage of Bette and Boo-not just writing and acting in it but everything that happened connected to it-can you say that this play set you free?

Olympia Dukakis, who played Soot, the mother of Boo, in the original cast of the Public production, said she thought the play was about forgiveness. I thought, “Hmm, is that it?” I wasn't aware of it. But I must say I came to wonder if Olympia's remark was true. I hoped it was true, partly because of how Jerry Zaks directed us in the hospital scene where Bette was dying and Boo came to see her. Jerry directed us to be sure not to play the sadness-and that Bette and Boo display an ease that they hadn't shown previously. In the notes of the play's acting edition, I did write that my feeling about writing about family upset is this: I feel that in therapy and conversations with good friends, one has to be able to go to the place of anger so that you can express it and hopefully you can be done with it. If you just keep it to yourself, or you keep saying that it doesn't matter, then the anger doesn't go away.

I must say that I decided that Bette and Boo was going to mark a change in my writing style, which had been so absurdist up until then. Starting with Sister Mary Ignatius, I started to include scenes where I would let the audience know, yes, I feel sympathy for these characters. Previously, some people who didn't like my work were confused about whether I was mad at my characters or whether I found just anything hilarious. One of the additional scenes I wrote when I went back to Bette and Boo was that scene on the telephone where Boo calls her school friend Bonnie Wilson, whom she hasn't spoken to for years. That scene is really about acknowledging the pain of the loss of the children. By including it, I was letting the audience in about what Bette is feeling. And I was letting them know that I know it's a serious thing, even though I've played with how it's done in a strange way.

Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, is the author of the play Love Seats for Virginia Woolf, among others.

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