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Production Information
I remember my first exposure to Christopher Durang, seeing Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and The Actor’s Nightmare back in 1981 -- at the then-tiny Playwright’s Horizons on NY’s 42nd Street/Theatre Row. I remember being horrified … and absolutely delighted … by the bitter, extreme violence of the humor. It took me back to the early days Saturday Night Live when they once did a sketch in which Gilda Radner portrayed a Claudine Longet firing her hunting rifle at the film projection of a falling skier. I remember screaming with laughter (I’ve continued tuning in for 30 years now, hoping they’d do something that funny again — but, alas). And here was a play (two of them, in fact) that elevated that kind of violent humor — taking it out of sketch comedy and putting it into the theatre. Into plays that have structure, themes, insight and intelligence. And here I was screaming once again. Christopher Durang is one of our great playwrights. His plays are always clever, always topical and always possess the intelligence of a writer who knows his place in dramatic literature. In this play alone, he references Beckett, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, the Greeks — and not just random name-dropping references. Durang creates works that grapple with the same themes and issues of his predecessors while always remaining contemporary and immediate. Be sure not to miss seemingly off-the-cuff comments like the Man’s summation of a life lived under society’s suppression of sexual and emotional feeling: “That was one cheery option ... nothing, and then the grave.” A not-so-slight allusion to Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. Durang succeeds in painting a rather bleak, existential picture -- all while we are screaming with laughter. No mean trick. All while Laughing Wild amid severest woe.
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