GLR July-August 2024

told The Advocate that he felt the need to be more public about his gay identity given the intense homophobia surrounding the AIDS crisis, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hard wick , and the Vatican’s statements on homosexuality, which he slammed as “genuinely evil.” He directly addressed these is sues in his play Laughing Wild (1987), again performing in his own work. His character mocks the religious Right’s concept of a God who created AIDS as retribution, imagining a capri cious deity who opines to Gabriel: “I hate homosexuals ... ex cept for Noel Coward—he was droll. And I hate Haitians. Anything beginning with the letter H.” Demoralized by a theater culture in which a bad review in The New York Times could close a show, Durang spent a few years focusing on his career as a performer. With Augustine as one of his backup singers, he created the successful cabaret act Chris Durang & Dawne, and he appeared onstage opposite Julie Andrews in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting It To gether (1993). In 1994, he and Marsha Norman became co-di rectors of the playwriting program at the Juilliard School, where he would influence a new generation of queer play wrights that included David Adjmi, Tanya Barfield, Samuel D. Hunter, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In 1999, his pitch-black comedy Betty’s Summer Vacation was hailed by critics as a comeback—and featured his most unsettling queer character: Keith, a “sensitive” young man who carries a shovel and a hatbox that may contain body parts. Keith is modeled in part on Robert Montgomery’s charming murderer in Night Must Fall , but he’s also inspired by Jeffrey July–August 2024

Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan—with perhaps a dash of Nor man Bates. Durang’s play takes the stereotype of the “homici dal homosexual” and turns it back on the audience, critiquing their hunger for tabloid sensationalism in a bloody circus of ever-increasing violence. Durang’s plays of the 21st century continued to earn criti cal praise, from the Pulitzer-nominated existential farce Miss Witherspoon (2005) to his Tony-winning Chekhovian comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2012). This final work became one of the most produced plays of the decade, includ ing a staging in 2014 with Durang playing the role of Vanya— an aging gay playwright dismayed by the state of contemporary culture—at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania, where he and Augustine made their home. In 2016, Durang was diagnosed with aphasia, which im paired his use of language and ultimately led to his death. Over a career that spanned four decades, Durang wrestled with the absurdity and tragedy of human suffering, and he used camp humor as both a defense and a weapon against a cruel world. With anarchic comedies that were sparked by rage, tinged with sorrow, and illuminated with compassion, Durang, borrowing a phrase from the poet Thomas Gray, in vited audiences to find pleasure and perhaps solace in “laugh ing wild amid severest woe.” Jordan Schildcrout, professor of theater at SUNY-Purchase, is the au thorof Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in American Theater (Univ. of Michigan, 2014).

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