This appeared in my book What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing, which was published by Yale University Press in 2017.
Q: When I’m asked to teach, I discover more about what my philosophy is just because I’m required to articulate it to others. To what degree have you surprised yourself teaching? To what degree have you found that you have a systematic philosophy of writing?
DURANG: I so much do not have a systematic thing of writing. I’m not very analytical with writing.
I co-teach with Marsha Norman and have since 1994. Julliard set up a playwriting program with two teachers simultaneously in the room. I’d never done team teaching, nor been a student of team teaching, so I had no idea what it would be like. Marsha asked me. I told her yes. And then I got cold feet because I thought, “Oh, what if it zaps my energy and I don’t want to write?” Or, “What if I don’t like the students’ writing? I don’t want to be negative on them.” So I told her I wasn’t sure. She said, “Well, why don’t you do it for six months and if you hate it, then you can quit.” And I thought, “Oh! That’s a smart way to handle me. She’s giving me permission to leave if I’m really not happy.” But then in our first year, we both just had a wonderful time and loved our students.
I’ll tell you about the co-teaching. We didn’t discuss it because one of my real fears was, “What do we do if we just don’t agree on something?”
We were both automatically very diplomatic with one another. If Marsha said something, I found I’d usually agree with it, but I might have a different take on it. So I would say, “I agree with what Marsha just said, but I also feel that …you need clearer exposition, or something like that.” We were very careful with one another. Plus we truly admire one another.
Q: Marsha was articulate about the idea that Jessica Goldberg raised about writing out of your “stuff.”
DURANG: It means you are writing from something deep inside you, something you know about, feel passionate about. Jessica said this in our third year of teaching… that all of us have one or two or three topics that we know in our gut. And our best work comes out when we are doing those topics. One of mine is I have a big reaction to forceful people – based on my family of origin. Oddly not my mother and father so much, but my mother and her siblings and their mother – there was often no diplomacy, it was you do what I want or you’re 100 times in the wrong.
In any case, I didn’t realize this was a theme with me until that class. Sister Mary Ignatius is good example.. she has charms, but you can’t disagree with her. (Plus she kills two people at the end.) And even in my early absurdist plays–like ‘dentiy Crisis–I have forceful characters (often crazy as well), like Edith Fromage who says she invented cheese, and she keeps telling her daughter Jane that her perceptions are all wrong– while in fact Jane is connected to reality, but by the end her belief in herself is gone and she goes crazy.
Q: Your stuff.
DURANG: David Lindsay-Abaire was also in our third class, and after he won the Pulitzer for his play Rabbit Hole, he told Marsha that he remembered her sometimes saying to writers, “What would scare you?” And David now had a child and he thought, “My biggest fear would be if my child was killed.” And so that play came from his “stuff.”
Marsha has a more analytical brain than I do and she has thoughts about what makes a good play. I’ll give an example. She would say things like, “Every good play has only one protagonist.” And then I would say, “I agree with that 99 percent. Although I can never tell who is the protagonist in Chekhov. The first time I saw The Three Sisters, the Irina was so good that she became the protagonist, although I think most of the time Masha is. Or maybe sometimes it’s all three of them.” But that doesn’t take away from Marsha being correct most of the time. Plus I had discovered with Beyond Therapy and some other plays of mine that when the protagonist was really clear–audiences really liked that. They knew who to follow. In Beyond Therapy it’s Prudence.
Q: How much of how you teach draws on your experiences having been taught at the Yale School of Drama?
DURANG: Richard Gilman was our main teacher at Yale. He was very smart, but he didn’t like to go to student productions. [Associate dean] Howard Stein was wonderful at going to student productions. But those were our main two teachers. Gilman was fascinating and analytical. Howard Stein was warm and encouraging. A good match between the two.
And then Robert Brustein [dean of the Yale School of Drama] hired Jerzy Kosiński to teach playwriting and dramaturgy. The day that I went for my application interview, there was an article in Time Magazine in which Kosiński said that he was teaching students in America and all American students were stupid. And I thought sarcastically, “Oh, this is going to be great.” And then I thought, “So, all right, he was showing off for the magazine.” But I don’t think he had written any plays. I think he was hired for his fame. And also he was talented. If he actually wrote any of those things.
In any case, the first class, he wasn’t hostile or anything, he was just sort of … seductive is the wrong word, but he was beguiling everybody. And he was talking for some reason about true romance magazines. Our first assignment from him was to go out and buy true romance magazines and read them, and then we were going to discuss them. And so I thought, “OK, he must have some interesting take on this that we’re going to learn.” I’d never read any but I knew they were sort of like written soap operas. So I read a couple and they weren’t interesting. And in class basically he said, “Weren’t they stupid? Aren’t people who read these stupid?” So I thought he was a joke. And more likely a psychological game player.
No one brought in any writing to his class. Except somebody in our group was a novelist who was invited to come for one year. He was a nice guy. For some reason he offered to read part of his novel aloud. Kosiński was simply mean afterwards. He didn’t say anything helpful or nice. I wasn’t really totally confident about whether I should be a playwright, so I thought to myself, “I’m going to lay low in this class. He doesn’t seem to care if you bring in work. So I’m not going to bring in any.
I was really dreading seeing Kosiński for a second year. And when we got back to school, it was announced that he was ill and Jules Feiffer, who was a tennis friend of Bob Brustein, was coming to teach us. And I thought, “Wow, what good luck for me.” I already loved Feiffer’s work. I’d read his plays, I’d seen Carnal Knowledge and certainly knew his cartoons. And so I just felt I’d gone from this person who was playing games to someone whose work I admired, and whose topics and humor were frankly a little akin to mine, or mine were akin to his.
I had had experiences with writing teachers who were nice and supportive, but who tended to be on the general side. But Feiffer was very specific which I really learned from. I brought in an early script–I can’t remember what–and we read it through aloud in class, and he said, “I really liked it until page six, and then in the middle of six to the middle of eight, I think it goes off.” And he explained why. I found that I agreed. I thought that he was smart about saying that the play was heading in this direction, and then it seemed to go off for a little bit but then it goes back again. I hadn’t had a teacher previously who had said something that specific.
Q: How much playwriting did you do before going to Yale? Did you write much when you were an undergrad at Harvard?
DURANG: I got there in 1967. I had written plays in high school (two of which got produced in my school). But at Harvard I lost my confidence about writing. I was in a bit of a depression. Senior year it finally lifted, and that year I wrote this crackpot musical, The Greatest Musical Ever Sung, which was like Mad Magazine doing religion. “Everything’s Coming up Moses” was a song. I ended up directing it. It played two weekends. In the world of Harvard, it was a hit. And the Harvard Crimson really liked it. Then suddenly there were all these letters to the editor saying, “This musical is blasphemous,” and “It’s terrible to make fun of people’s religion,” and blah blah blah. And then the next week some professor wrote in and said, “Has no one ever heard of satire?” And then the third week, the Catholic chaplain got some people to sign his letter that the play was offensive, and William Alfred was one of the ones who signed. He was well known as a serious Catholic and someone who went to church every single day. He was also my favorite teacher (as a lecturer, I didn’t know him personally).
My last semester, he was going to offer a playwriting class. I’d just written this other play called The Nature and Purpose of the Universe in which there’s this crazy Catholic nun who by mistake kills the Pope. It’s not really about religion, although it’s an absurdist “Book of Job.” I thought to myself, “He’s going to think I’m this crazy anti-Catholic because in the play the Pope gets killed.” I did not expect to get in, but I did. He accepted my play. When we discussed it he said good things about it. And once privately I said, “Professor Alfred, did you realize that I’m the person who wrote that musical that you signed a letter against saying that it was anti-Catholic?” And with a sparkle in his eye, he said, “Yes, you’re very mischievous.”
My freshman year he taught a class about British and American theater–1940 to the present, something like that. He was a wonderful lecturer. In the first class, he said, “To make sense out of American and British drama, you have to at least know something about all the previous drama. So for the first week we’re going to read a Greek tragedy and then we’re going to read a Roman play, and then we’re going to read Moliere and then we’ll read Chekhov.” It was the first time I’d actually read Chekhov and I found it hard to read it on the page. But Professor Alfred was a wonderful reader, and he read Chekhov with all this surface chatter that suddenly would go sad or lost for a moment, and then go back to chatter. He brought Chekhov alive for me.
Q: Parody has been a major element of some of your pieces. Your first professionally produced play, which you co-wrote with Albert Innaurato, was The Idiots Karamazov which took on Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Anais Nin, Dickens and O’Neill, among others. A lot of writers have written parody early in the careers. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote it for the revues in clubs in the Village, and Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart spoofed movies and plays for Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows. And, of course, they all went on to write other things. Do you see yourself in that tradition?
DURANG: I certainly don’t think of parody with all of my plays. My early plays were very absurdist. And then sometimes they were parody-like. The one that pops out especially is For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls. I saw the Jessica Tandy-Amanda Plummer production of The Glass Menagerie and I thought the acting was really good, especially by the two of them. But by now I had seen the play something like fifteen times or something, and, although I loved it and still love it, that day I started to feel irritation with the character of Laura because I’d always thought, “Oh she’s so sensitive,” and “I feel bad for her.” And I suddenly started to identify with the mother and go, “Well, how hard is it to go to typing school?” And so I came home that night and wrote this parody. That was definitely a parody and I knew I was doing it. A History of the American Film wasn’t meant to just be one parody after another. It went through American history too, and the changes after World War II. But there’s no question that there were parody-like things throughout all of it.
Q: There are different kinds of parody. One might distinguish between affectionate parody like Southern Belle which says, “Let’s kid the elements of a work that we all actually love.” As opposed to a parody that attacks a work’s integrity. That’s what I felt when I saw Stye of the Eye, which was your take-off on Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. I did not think that you were writing about a work for which you had great affection.
DURANG: I think that that’s true. It is also because the play was so praised by the critics. And I couldn’t believe how long it was. (But that was a production Shepard directed himself in New York.) I have to say, once I was working on the parody, it was fun to write. And there are Sam Shepard plays I do like.
I guess I’m resisting saying, “Oh yes, I came from parody.” I think I came from liking comedy and liking the absurd. I was more influenced by reading Albee’s An American Dream than I was influenced by Carol Burnett. Although I really liked the Carol Burnett stuff.
Q: The Carol Burnett movie spoofs appealed to our affection for the movies invoked, but Burnett very rarely suggested that there were deeper messages implicit in those films. Part of what struck me about A History of the American Film was you were saying, “Hey, let’s take a look at these values implicit in our entertainment.”
DURANG: I had somewhere read Pauline Kael liked A Man’s Castle with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young. I went to see it. It’s a lovely, lovely movie. Even though I loved the movie, I started out writing kind of a parody of it. I decided to have the Loretta character from Man’s Castle get separated from Spencer Tracy. (I used to call the character Spence but then over time changed it to Jimmy for Jimmy Cagney because later on the character didn’t seem right for Spencer Tracy.) Anyway, at some point I thought, “What if she went to Hollywood and got involved in something like a Busby Berkeley musical?” And as soon as I thought of that I thought, “Oh, and then we can just keep going up through the genres and the decades.” I guess what I was aiming for was that back then there was a lot of optimism in America, and kindness sometimes. For instance, in A Man’s Castle, Loretta Young sleeps on a park bench. She looks lovely but has nothing. And Spencer has nothing either, but he’s very canny. He finds an empty shack that they can live in. He somehow brings home a stove for her and she weeps when she gets the stove. And so that’s kind of where I was coming from. Toward the end, I use references to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is obviously a play and a movie both. But it also was like the flip side of A Man’s Castle because the married couple are so ghastly to one another.
Q: There were also political strokes. I remember the character based on Jane Darwell, the actress who played the mother in the film of Grapes of Wrath. You had her do a version of the “We’re the people” speech in a movie from the Depression and then she ended up in the electric chair accused as a Communist spy during the McCarthy era. I’m guessing that connects back to the nuns scaring you about the red menace.
DURANG: Well, it’s true we were told that we might wake up in the morning and find out communists had taken over. But it was the Benedictine priests who taught me in high school, who taught about Joseph McCarthy, and they did not think well of him. Unlike my Uncle (a forceful person–ah my “stuff”).
I wrote many drafts of American Film. Brustein gave me a suggestion that was very helpful. He thought that I should play the game more carefully. I had Loretta in a women’s prison in the Thirties. But it felt like a 1950s movie. I immediately thought, “He’s right. It does make you think of the Fifties and I’m only in the Thirties now.” So I took that out. And then he said that he felt I should choose a few more famous movies, because I was referencing so many obscure ones. And so I put in a big Casablanca section, and also Citizen Kane. He didn’t tell me what movies to put it, but his suggestion was very helpful.
Which relates to something Marsha says, when we’re teaching: “We don’t want to give writers specific suggestions of how to rewrite because even if it’s a good idea from us, you’re not going to want to do it because it’s now come from us.” One day Marsha invited a very talented playwright as a guest (I won’t say the name). At the time Daniel Goldfarb was one of our students, and he brought in a play. As soon as the play was over, the visiting playwright said, “I can tell you what you have to do. First of all you have the wrong main character. You’ve got to get rid of this character, and this other character really is the main person.” Daniel was both traumatized and also, because he has a sense of humor, he found it funny. Because it was so different than anything Marsha and I would ever say.
History was my breakthrough to full length. It still had a lot of that cartoony feeling and jumping around, although there were occasional moments of emotion in the play.
The one other really notable one that started as a parody was The Vietnamization of New Jersey, since that absolutely started as a parody of [David Rabe’s] Sticks and Bones that was meant to be like fifteen minutes and was done at the Yale cabaret. Brustein offered to give me a commission for Yale Rep. I think it was actually Brustein’s request: could I expand it. I don’t think on my own I would have.
I hadn’t read Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. And then I read it. And I thought it was very good. It helped me with act two because I took the sort of bullying sergeant in that and I made it be the brother of my character who had killed himself at the end of act one. So there was definitely a lot of parody in that. Although, what I found strange: writing act two, I was on some level writing the same kind of scene that David Rabe himself had been writing. So my parody sort of suddenly got in synch with him and it kind of ended up being similar in theme.
I guess the only resistance you’re getting from me is I really have written a bunch of plays that don’t have to do with parody. Sister Mary Ignatius is not a parody in any way.
Q: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You came after History.
DURANG: History was successful in the regionals but then not successful on Broadway. Around this time my mother got cancer (she saw the opening of the play on Broadway, but it was the last time she could walk on her own). Her prognosis was not good, and her illness went on for a couple of years. It was very hard for me to write. Also I was not sure what to write.
I ended up beginning Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You partially because I was watching my mother take some comfort from her Catholic beliefs and I was thinking, “Wow, I wish I had those beliefs right now.” I was finding myself amazed rethinking about some of the things we were taught when we were little, like six and seven. They taught you the ten commandments, and said that “Though shalt not commit adultery” forbade all impurities in thought, word or deed, whether alone or with others, and if you broke the rule you would be sent to hell. At six I didn’t understand what it meant, though I got the sense genitals were bad. Later at 13, one figures out that masturbation sends you to hell. You can go to confession but you promise never to do it again, and you have to mean it.
In the first half of the play, Sister Mary is giving a lecture, and I wrote in this little boy who’s seven, and he recites the Catechism for the audience at the Sister’s request. But then I sort of thought, “Ah, I don’t know if I can make an actual play with just the two of them. I don’t know how to wrap it up.” And by the way I had no idea the play would be successful. It seemed just like something I was choosing to do. So I put it aside. And then one day I suddenly thought what if she talks about some of her students from years ago. What if some of them are now 30 and they show up at her lecture, ostensibly to surprise her, but actually to complain to her about how her teaching didn’t prepare them for real life in any way. So I was starting to write that. I hadn’t finished it when, around then, my mother died. I spent about a month closing up her house.
And then I went to visit my then partner Stephen in DC. On the train I was writing the play. And I surprised myself when I wrote this terribly serious scene. Diane–when asked by Sister, “Why did you want to embarrass me?”–says, “Because I believed you and I don’t think you should lie to people.” And then she talks about her mother’s death of cancer, which mirrored my mother’s death. My mother briefly awoke from a coma, panicked and went unconscious again, which was upsetting to see. So the character of Diane talked about that. And then I kind of cheated a little bit. And I had Diane being raped on the day her mother dies and then gets an abortion. I wanted people to see the extremity of a rape victim not wanting to carry the child. But I did add the line, “But bad things sometimes happen all at once.”
As I was writing this, two things happened. One was the thought, “The play is coming to an end and it’s not going to be full length.” And then the other was, “I’ve written this section that I know is not funny. It’s not meant to be funny. But will the audience be OK with it?” I completed Diane’s speech but I spent a little time wondering if I should put the play aside and try to write a full-length play instead, because the common thought is you can never make any money out of a one act-play. And then luckily I thought, “No, I’ve been having a writer’s block. I better finish this.” So I finished Sister Mary and sent it to my agent, the wonderful Helen Merrill.
Helen knew I was dealing with my mother’s cancer, and was worried because I just wasn’t having much inspiration. Like a year had gone by. And History had not been the hit we thought it would be. I said to Helen, “How long will people remember me if I don’t come out with another play?” And she said, “You have two years.” It sounded so specific, but I actually took that as comforting. At that point, I had another year to go. And Helen was nervous when she got Sister Mary, she so much wanted it to be good. And she loved it, and placed it with Ensemble Studio Theater. It won Obies for me and the great actress Elizabeth Franz. But then it was over in three weeks.
Q: And then later, paired with The Actor’s Nightmare, it was an enormous hit off-Broadway. It sounds to me that frequently when you start writing a play, you don’t know what the play is going to be but you send signals to yourself and you say, “Oh, wait a second, this is why I’m doing this.”
DURANG: I think that that’s true. I think that that’s true. Because I’m definitely not the kind who can outline. Every so often, when I wrote in Hollywood, I’ve had to force myself to do that. But writing my own plays, you’re right, I feel I sort of find them as I’m going.
Q: Something interesting happened with you and John Guare and a few other people. It used to be the genres were fairly rigidly isolated. You chose a genre in which to write and you did not break the rules. But then there was this almost farcical comedy John wrote called The House of Blue Leaves, and at the end, the leading man strangles his wife to death. And the audience goes, “Wait a second, wasn’t this supposed to be a comedy?” I can’t quite put my finger on how and when it happened, but there was some kind of breakdown in the culture in the late Fifties and the early Sixties where the institutions that we placed so much faith in began to fail us and we started questioning things. I wonder whether there was a corresponding breakdown of genre rules.
DURANG: It could be. I’ve always liked John Guare’s work. Before Joe Papp did The Marriage of Bette and Boo, he did John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, which I saw at the Public and really loved. I feel it inspired me, as did House of Blue Leaves. But you know, I think you’re correct to say that–at least for me and Guare–we sometimes are writing a comedy and then we go off into a different tone all of a sudden. And I actually love doing that. (I think he does too!)
And you know what? I’m thinking of some of the movies I saw that did that kind of change when I was in high school and college. Fellini was often so funny, but also full of longing; and plus he brought in his Catholicism all the time, which gave me “permission” to bring in my Catholicism. And I was very taken by Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. It’s so quirky and playful and yet the ending is so sad. Heartbreaking.
Q: It suggests that lives don’t fit neatly into one genre. There are times when your life is drama, and there are times when your life feels like farce. Why does a play have to stick to one genre if your life doesn’t?
DURANG: Well it doesn’t, at least not all the time.
I’ve never felt that I was trying to upset people. I know that they did get upset, but I didn’t expect them to. Or if I did, I thought it would be a small group who didn’t understand theater or something. I must say that sometimes when I look at some of my early plays, I’m slightly shocked at what I’ve written. About ten years ago I was looking at my play Titanic, which is probably the most sexual, insane play I’ve ever written. When it was done in New York, it was done at eleven at night and got sort of mixed but pretty good reviews. And then John Rothman decided to move it, and then it was the mainstream critics who came, and they were horrified, just horrified. It wasn’t that I was going, “Oh good, I got ‘em!” Because I wasn’t trying to do that. It was just my own take on the world. In Titanic the character that Sigourney played was the captain’s daughter and she’s meant to be really young. She’s being friendly to Teddy who’s sort of shy. And she says something like, “I used to keep a hedgehog up my vagina, but my parents stopped me because I kept feeding it in public. I think that’s being fussy, don’t you?” Then she says, “I have a couple of hamsters in here now. Boy do they make a mess!” Now, why did I write that? I had heard or read somewhere that Freud said that men sometimes had unconscious fears that a women’s vagina had teeth. But when I put it into Titanic, it turns out no one knows that theory of Freud’s. I never heard a review of the play that makes mention of it. I do remember when it was done late at night, mostly the audiences who went to quirky night shows enjoyed it. But I was standing sort of on the side, and I saw that there was this woman in her late twenties, blonde, who was looking so angry and so turned off. And I thought: oh, oh dear, she just is hating this. And it wasn’t even that scene, it was like the whole thing was bumming her out.
Q: I wonder if you feel as I do, that there are some figures who give you permission to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I felt that way about Lanford Wilson, and Lanford seemed to feel that way about Thornton Wilder.
DURANG: Thornton Wilder I feel is also influential to me. When I read The Skin of Our Teeth, that was really exciting. I’ve never seen a production, isn’t that awful? Reading it, it doesn’t feel as though it entirely works at the end, but I just love it anyway. (Not to mention Our Town, which I’m so glad I saw after college and never read in high school.)
Q: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike both is recognizably in your voice and yet has a new tone for you. Dare I say it, but it comes across as a play by a happy person. A happy person who loves Chekhov.
DURANG: At some point I suddenly thought, oh my God, I’m now so old that I’m the age of the older characters in Chekhov. I mostly saw and read the Chekhov plays in my twenties and thirties. And then, because I live in what’s called a farmhouse, I also was thinking that in Chekhov, oftentimes the people in the country are bored and unhappy and are jealous of the people, like Madame Arkadina or the professor in Uncle Vanya, who live in the city being acclaimed and appear to be happy.
I sometimes have said that Vanya and Sonia for me is a “what if” play. You know, I did go to the city. And I spent at least twenty years there. And I liked it. And I feel that I was lucky that I got to do what I had wanted to do. And so I wasn’t angry the way that so many of the Chekhov characters are, and Uncle Vanya certainly is. So I thought, well, what if I hadn’t gone off to New York, and had tried to write. What would my life be like if I hadn’t done those things. So that was the beginning. I thought what if I went to college but I for some reason came home and then I got sort of stuck taking care of my parents with my adopted sister. Of course I don’t actually have siblings but I needed more characters.
Q: Dialogue is easier when there’s somebody else on stage.
DURANG: Indeed! So somebody was going to be Vanya and somebody was going to be Sonia. She’s the niece in Uncle Vanya, but she’s often cast close to the same age as Vanya. So I made Sonia his sister. I initially thought that Sonia’s crush on Vanya was going to be a bigger part of the play, so I decided she was adopted so that we wouldn’t be dealing with incest. But then he tells her very early on, “You’re not really interested in me anymore. There’s just no one else in the house.” And she says, “You’re right. I am sick of you.” And I was envisioning their frustration from having had to take care of the parents.
Then I got thinking of Madame Arkadina and, since I’m putting it in the present, I thought she’s a movie star. And of course movie star made me think of Sigourney. It is true that Sigourney has made so many of her movies abroad, so that–just as her friend–I can not speak to her for like six months or something.
Q: This sounds like another example of you discovering what you need to write while you’re writing.
DURANG: I find sometimes I get to the finish of act one and I do not know what is supposed to happen in act two. And I sometimes stop for a couple of months because I just don’t know. I remember we had a reading at the McCarter Theater of act one of Vanya, and I had act one of another play, a political play. I had asked if we could have back-to-back readings of both in the same day and they could tell me which one they were intuitively drawn to. I was secretly hoping they would tell me Vanya, which they did. (The other one, which I haven’t gone back to, hasn’t been finished.)
At the end of act one, I sent the characters off to a party. So it was like what else is going to happen. It came from the dialogue that Masha was obsessed with her Snow White costume and that she wanted the two of her siblings to go to the party as dwarves, and she brought the costumes. And Vanya didn’t care and said OK. And then Sonia was upset and didn’t want to go as a dwarf. And writing it I thought, “Well, she could just hate the sister and refuse to go. Or, she could go in the costume and hate the sister even more.” And then I decided, “Well what if she comes up with another way of doing Snow White, which is going as the evil queen who is actually gorgeous in the beginning?” And so I was going to have Sonia go off and find her own costume. At first I was going to have her find something that looked a little bit like the queen, but then I decided it was just an evening gown and it didn’t have to connect at all, but be glamorous just to annoy Masha.
Q: I heard that part of the solution came from the woman who ended up playing Sonia, Kristine Nielsen herself.
DURANG: I had once been at lunch with Kristine and she suddenly spoke in a Maggie Smith voice and she did it really well. This was about two years before writing the play. And so I suddenly thought, “OK, so she comes in and she makes all these references to that Neil Simon movie where Maggie Smith plays an actress who is nominated for an Oscar.”
Q: California Suite.
DURANG: Right. Kristine had been in that first reading as Sonia, and she had such playfulness with the Maggie Smith thing that I then thought, “Well you know what? I bet Sonia actually had a good time at the party. She doesn’t go to parties ever, but …” So then when I came up with somebody was going to call her, I didn’t really know that it was going to turn into a date and the slight implication of, oh he’s a widower and she’s older, and who knows maybe they’ll be right for each other. So anyway I just stumbled into that.
Q: So sometimes you’re discovering things about five minutes before the audience does.
DURANG: I had no idea that the play was going to end up with the three main characters feeling better off than they did in the beginning. Which is very much the opposite of a Chekhov play.
Q: It’s interesting to me that you’re writing in that case was not only the characters that you want to write about but on some level it was you also being playful with the people that you were writing it for. Because of Kristine Nielsen, you have actresses all over the country now trying to learn how to imitate Maggie Smith. And they’re having a hell of a time, I gotta tell ya, because very few people can do as good a Maggie Smith as Kristine can.
DURANG: Of the ones I’ve seen, I’ve mostly seen fairly good ones. But when they’re less good, it’s sort of OK because you can realize just that this particular Sonia is doing her best to sound like Maggie Smith but she’s just, you know, going in that direction but not quite landing.
Q: And by the same token, you’re using elements of Sigourney’s own career. Of course other people now play that part. But it wasn’t lost on people watching it that to some degree this was a comment on some of the action movies that she’d been in, this conservatory-trained actress running around in her underwear in front of green screens. On some level your actors must have known that you were employing aspects of them and feeding them back into the play so that they could parody themselves.
DURANG: One of the reasons I was writing it, it didn’t feel like I was touching something painful. Because for Vanya I was thinking of my own self, I’m not bitter in the same way. Life isn’t always wonderful but, you know, I feel lucky that I got to do a lot. And I did experience New York and I left on my own choice. But after a time I liked it when I was there. And then Kristine–a few years ago got married and she’s very happy. When I knew her earlier, she had been very lonely. And I don’t think I would have written it this way if I hadn’t already known that she in her life is not lonely now. And so with Sigourney, she has had her ups and downs with her career. Though I must say she has worked really steadily and done some wonderful things. And the first two Aliens were really, really good and the second ones were good enough. But unlike Masha she didn’t really want to become a classical actress. I think she enjoys doing it when someone casts her, but that isn’t like it’s a big thing in her life. And also, unlike Masha, she’s very logical and steady and she doesn’t come in and take over a room the way that Masha does. She’s not selfish in that way. So I felt that I was making reference to both of them but not in a dot-by-dot way.
Q: I don’t know how many people have told you this, but sometimes when I’m teaching playwriting and I talk to the students about their influences, you are among the most frequently cited writers. I think a lot of it has to do with the edginess of your work and a sense that there’s little that is sacred. Certainly nobody attempting to write comedy for the theater today is ignorant of you.
DURANG: I think it was 1998 or something, I was asked to some conference in the south. It was Florida. I was asked to give a speech of some kind. I thought I was speaking to teachers, but I didn’t realize that they were coming with a lot of their students who were auditioning for, I think, summer theaters. I was asked to sign some of my plays in bookstore there. I was taken aback by how much the young people knew me and seemed thrilled to meet me. I was surprised. They were high school students mostly. Maybe some were college. I was just surprised that people seemed to read me. That made me feel good, truthfully. I didn’t know that people knew me that much.
Jeffrey Sweet--Making the Scene 