Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Preface: “Christopher Durang Explains It All For Me,” by David Lindsay-Abaire (Playwright, USA) Introduction: Christopher Durang’s Dark Comedy 1 Perverting the Classics The Idiots Karamazov The Vietnamization of New Jersey History of the American Film Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge Adrift in Macao 2 Seeking is Believing The Nature and Purpose of the Universe Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You Laughing Wild Sex and Longing Miss Witherspoon 3 One-Act Plays Durang/Durang 4 Family Dysfunction Titanic Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes ‘dentity Crisis Baby with the Bathwater The Marriage of Bette & Boo 5 American Anomie Beyond Therapy Media Amok Betty’s Summer Vacation Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike 6 Conclusion 7 Critical Perspectives We Laugh-Track People: Christopher Durang’s Drama of Audience Participation, Robert Combs (George Washington University, USA) The Marriage of Parody and Satire: The All-American Comedy of Christopher Durang, Jay Malarcher (West Virginia University, USA) List of Contributors Notes Works Cited

Promotional Information

A comprehensive examination of Christopher Durang’s major and minor (one-act) plays, from his early success of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You (1974) to his Tony-Award winning play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2012) focusing specifically on how his plays have been instrumental in defining American dramatic comedy.

About the Author

Miriam M. Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is Professor of English. Together with Kelly Younger, she edited How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays, also by Methuen Drama. She is most recently the author of “Performed Authenticity: Narrating the Self in the Comic Monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo and Spalding Gray,” (Studies in American Humor 2016), and has written articles for Text and Presentation, Comparative Drama, and Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies. This is her first book.