The news that the American Catholic playwright Christopher Durang has been diagnosed with aphasia and is retiring from theatrical activity might be an occasion for reevaluating his comic artistry. Born in New Jersey in 1949, Durang acquired notoriety for his 1979 one-act play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, an absurdist dark comedy with a tragic ending. Although in interviews Durang claimed literary influences from Noël Coward, Joe Orton and Monty Python, perhaps his closest stylistic contemporary is the grotesque Baltimore-born filmmaker John Waters.
Durang was educated at Our Lady of Peace School and Delbarton School, where he was instructed by Dominican nuns and Benedictine priests respectively. He appreciated his teachers, especially Denis Malin, who directed two musicals which Durang wrote at Delbarton, and Father Sean Cunneen, who asked his history students to write a daily essay, an assignment Durang credited with teaching him to write. He encountered no harsh or obstreperous faculty and sought to join a monastery after graduation, but was advised to wait before making any such decision.
So where did the satirical Sister Mary Ignatius derive from? Maternal aunts far more pious than his mother, who suffered from a series of medical conditions, frustrated Durang with their holier-than-thou preaching. Lofty advice, but scant practical help, from clergy to his mother in the throes of her ailments was another irritant. The notion that any belief system could offer all the answers to life’s puzzles began to seem absurd.
Sister Mary Ignatius echoed the old Baltimore Catechism, the national Catholic catechism for children in the United States, based on Robert Bellarmine’s Small Catechism of 1614. When reminded by another character that Jesus forgave the adulterous woman in the Gospels, Sister Mary Ignatius responds: “That was merely a political gesture. In private Christ stoned many women taken in adultery.” She also declared with absolute certainty that such celebrities as Zsa Zsa Gabor and Brooke Shields would “burn in hell”.
In a review from 1981, Walter Kerr – critic and longtime speech and drama instructor at The Catholic University of America – deemed this repartee “malicious fun” and a “startlingly funny piece of work”, highlighting an eponymous heroine who was “not a wilful ogre but a literalist, a wildly strict logician. You can’t fault her conclusions if you can buy her premises.” Kerr went on to observe: “What I find most curious about [the play] is that it is startlingly funny for precisely so long as it clings stubbornly and passionately to the record, inventing almost nothing.”
Durang’s mentor at Harvard University, the American Catholic dramatist William Alfred, who attended daily Mass at St Paul’s Church in Cambridge, MA, once told Durang smilingly, “You’re very mischievous.” Other influential periodicals such as the National Catholic Reporter generally agreed. But distinctly less amused was Archbishop John L May of St Louis, Missouri, who in his archdiocesan weekly newspaper slated Sister Mary Ignatius as a “vile diatribe against all things Catholic”, and called for a boycott. Even the local Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the National Conference of Christians and Jews agreed, calling the play “offensive, unfair and demeaning”.
A Pennsylvania theatre was obliged to cancel a 1985 production in the face of vehement Church objections that the “message that the play portrays is really that all of Christianity and specifically the Catholic Church is fraudulent, that the ministers of religion are peddling lies and that anybody that is in a sense seduced by them into believing has become psychologically deformed.” Yet from the start, the role of Sister Mary Ignatius was cast with charismatic actresses who radiated humour and humanity, including Elizabeth Franz, Nancy Marchand, Kathleen Chalfont and Lynn Redgrave.
Durang was an aficionado of glamorous Hollywood nuns and saints. In a 1982 article for Film Comment magazine, he admitting adoring movies like The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St Mary’s, Going My Way and The Nun’s Story which he first saw as a parochial schoolboy. The Dominican sister who served as principal would rent Catholic-themed Hollywoodiana several times a year. Classes would be cancelled, and all the students would gather in the school cafeteria to imbibe them.
The impact on Durang was lifelong. “Ingrid Bergman is smashing-looking as a nun,” he wrote in Film Comment. So his mockery of unyielding doctrinal assurance in Sister Mary Ignatius was not intended as an assault on all people in religious authority. As Durang told the New York Times in 1994, “To call my play anti-Catholic because I criticise a nun who’s conservative is akin to saying that Medea is against all mothers.”
Yet some spectators missed this nuance. Steve Vineberg, who teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, blogged in 2018 that when he taught Sister Mary Ignatius to his class over three decades before, “several of my students clamoured, with competitive fervour, to tell anecdotes about the fearsome nuns whose reigns of terror they’d suffered through”.
Vineberg noted that “the titular sister’s intolerance for anything less than the most pure, doctrinal (and bloodthirsty) vision of the universe is ultimately psychotic, but my students recognised her immediately”. This invitation for airing grievances might be the most unsettling legacy of the play, in addition to a final scene of gun violence which leaves a harrowing impression after the verbal amusement of most of what precedes it.
Four decades on from the initial appearance of Sister Mary Ignatius, events in the Church as well as plays staged since may have made Catholic audiences more difficult to shock. A serious subject presented risibly is no longer as novel or unsettling as it was in 1980, and wider exposure to the consequences of religious extremism in different faiths may put Durang’s discourse in perspective.
It may be time for another look at Durang’s accomplishments; not just Sister Mary Ignatius, which remains a solid vehicle for a magisterial actress, but also The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (1975) in which Sister Annie De Maupassant claims she is the real pope, and organises a posse to kidnap the imposter in the Vatican. This play, with its view of the deity as demiurge, may be even more philosophically unorthodox than Sister Mary Ignatius, but paradoxically sparked no calls for boycotts or censorship.
Still another drama, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985) dissected how Durang’s mother suffered stillbirths due to a genetic imbalance combined with the Vatican ban on birth control that might have prevented further pregnancies. In Laughing Wild (1987), Durang himself acted the role of the Infant of Prague – the famous statue of the infant Jesus, which in 2024 will celebrate the 200th anniversary of its pontifical coronation by Pope Leo XII – transformed into a celebrity interviewee.
Readers and theatregoers prepared for a sardonic voice on subjects of import in quest of healing laughter may well find Christopher Durang to be a writer who can explain at least some of it to us all.
Benjamin Ivry has written biographies of Francis Poulenc, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Ravel
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