Christopher Durang: Toys in the Attic

About the author:
The name Christopher Durang has become synonymous with absurd, smart, witty humor. The playwright/performer/educator's plays include A History of the American Film Tony nomination, Beyond Therapy, Baby with the Bathwater, The Actor's Nightmare, Laughing Wild, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You Obie Award and The Marriage of Bette and Boo Obie Award and Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Award. As an actor, Durang has been seen on stages from New York to Los Angeles and appeared in many films, including Housesitter, The Butcher's Wife, Mr. North, The Cowboy Way, The Secret of My Success, The Out-of-Towners and many others. With Marsha Norman, he is co-chair of the Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School. Durang's latest play, Miss Witherspoon, stars Kristine Nielsen and features the playwright's trademark blend of satire, black comedy and high camp. Here, Durang takes us on a tour through his muses--from Minnie Mouse to Sigourney Weaver to Nielsen.

From a young age I wanted to be a playwright. An actor too, but more strongly a playwright.

When I was seven, and I still believed in Santa Claus, my mother saw me looking with intense interest at this tin stage that was in some toy store. It was the size of a microwave which, of course, didn't exist then, and it was being sold with these rubber Disney characters that were the right size to fit on the stage--Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, etc.

Christmas morning, this stage and about 10 of these rubber figures magically appeared under the Christmas tree. I still don't know how Santa Claus knew I wanted this. Maybe God told him. Or some intelligent design for sure. Definitely not evolution. Or, of course, maybe it was my mother.

Anyway, this was a most successful toy for me, and for the next six or seven years, most afternoons I would go to the attic and put on plays with these figures. I would speak the dialogue aloud, and move the characters around the stage. Or if it was a musical--say, Oklahoma!--I would make up the dialogue paraphrased from my memory of the plot, and then play the songs on the victrola, while I moved the figures around the stage. A victrola was an early kind of microwave you could play records on.

In Oklahoma!, Daisy Duck, with yellow clay put on her head for long hair, was cast as Laurey, the Rodgers and Hammerstein good girl ingénue. While Minnie Mouse, who looked more like the second lead to me, was cast as Ado Annie. She also looked a bit like Gloria Graham, who was in the movie.

Sometimes I would see a movie title listed in the TV Guide--such as Dinner at Eight--and without ever seeing it, I would free associate my own version of it just based on the title.

Once I put on The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I saw when it came out which means when I was nine. Why a nine year old was so impressed with Bridge on the River Kwai, I can't say. But I put on a version of it in the attic--though the story was too vast for the tin stage, it kind of spread out over the rug instead so I could take in railroad trains and bridges collapsing and so on. Donald Duck, with a moustache drawn on his lip, played Alec Guinness' part, and they both won Oscars.

Once when I was depressed and not doing well in college, my mother looked over at me and said, "You never should have left the attic. You were happy there." I looked at her startled, but then luckily we both laughed.

I did eventually graduate to live actors… actually I stopped using Mickey Mouse as Clark Gable and Daisy Duck as Ava Gardner when I was 13, choosing to go through puberty instead. And shortly after that my best friend Kevin Farrell and I wrote a musical together--called Banned in Boston. Which was somewhat prescient, since I had censorship issues in Boston with my play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You many years later. And though we were now 13 and 14, the musical was being performed by the juniors and seniors in the school. And I got to hear audience laugh at lines I hadn't even quite realized were funny.

I went to Yale School of Drama in playwriting, and I graduated from having Minnie Mouse to having Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney, a fellow student, was in my first one-act at the Yale Cabaret, and I would scream at her, "No, no--do it like Minnie would! And in a higher register. And with mouse ears." Sigourney was good-natured and would try this.

Well, I'm kidding…but Sigourney was in my first play at the cabaret, it only rehearsed a week; and I was asked to step in for one of the leads when an actor had to drop out. So then I played Sigourney's worried brother, and she was my neurotic, nervous-breakdown-prone sister. And I found myself kind of playing the concern for real, which oddly kind of informed the piece, and gave it an undercurrent of seriousness the same time it was absurdist and insane.

A high point of the show was when Sigourney sang the title song "Better Dead Than Sorry" while receiving shock treatments. She constructed a "shock treatment" hat all herself--a bathing cap with empty thread spools on top, out which came little wires. And the song would be interrupted with the sound of electric shocks, and Sigourney, in her subtle comic way, would widen her eyes, and move her head kind of slowly, and look blank for a second, before continuing with the song. It was inventive and funny.

I later met Kristine Nielsen through Sigourney. Director Jim Simpson Sigourney's husband cast Kristine many times in plays, and that's when I first saw her. And then she and I acted together in a misbegotten if well-intentioned production of Ubu. Sometimes shared disasters bring people together, and Kristine and I grew to be close from that experience. Then I initially thought she was too young for the crazy Mrs. Siezmagraff in my play Betty's Summer Vacation--until she did a reading of the play for me, and then it became necessary to have her play the role, we just had to cast her daughter as 20 instead of 29.

And now Kristine is playing a new role for me in Miss Witherspoon. And most times I think she's just great. Some times I have to yell "No, no! Do it like Daisy Duck would! And stop thinking for yourself! Here, put some yellow clay on your head."

But then I come to my senses, and realize I'm not in the attic although I was happier there, my mother was right. And that really I better just let Kristine and the director do their work, and I'll just wave approvingly from a distance.