Laughing wild amid severest woe perfectly describes the fiercely ironic comedy of Christopher Durang s Laughing Wild (which takes its title from this Thomas Gray quotation via Samuel Beckett) and the previously unpublished Baby with the Bathwater. In Laughing Wild, two comic monologues evolve into a man and a woman s shared nightmare of modern life and the isolation it creates. From her turf battles at the supermarket to the desperate cliches of self-affirmation he learns at his personality workshop, they run the gamut of everyday life s small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous...

Few playwrights have explored as relentlessly as Christopher Durang the pain and confusion of everyday life--or made us laugh so uproariously at the results. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, the center of a storm of controversy for its satire of misplaced trust in religious authority," remains as powerful today as when it was originally produced. The excruciatingly funny The Nature and Purpose of the Universe asks whether Eleanor Mann's Job-like suffering is really her fault, while Titanic takes us into the heart of children's anger with their parents and parents' manipula-tion...

Never have marriage and the family been more scathingly or hilariously savaged than in this brilliant black comedy. The marriage of Bette and Boo brings together two of the maddest families in creation in a portrait album of family life s uncertainties and confusion. Bereaved by miscarriages, undermined by their families, separated by alcoholism, assaulted by disease, and mystified by their priest, Bette and Boo, in their bewildered attempts to provide a semblance of hearth and home, are presented with a poignant compassion that enriches and enlarges the play, and places Christopher Durang...

Christopher Durang, the criminally funny author of "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You," returns to the scene of his prime with two raucous new plays about death, religion, and a creamy Christmas pudding. In "Miss Witherspoon"named one of the Ten Best Plays of 2005 by both "Time" and "Newsday"Veronica, a recent suicide whose cantankerous attitude has not improved in the afterlife, discovers that the one thing worse than the world she left behind is having to go back for seconds. Ordered to cleanse her brown tweedy aura, Veronica resists being reincarnated (as a trailer-trash teen or...

Full Length, Musical / 4m, 3f /Unit Sets Nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Music Set in 1952 in Macao, China, ADRIFT IN MACAO is a loving parody of film noir movies. Everyone that comes to Macao is waiting for something, and though none of them know exactly what that is, they hang around to find out. The characters include your film noir standards, like Laureena, the curvacious blonde, who luckily bumps into Rick Shaw, the cynical surf and turf casino owner her first night in town. She ends up getting a job singing in his night club - perhaps for no reason other than the fact that she...

Musical / 9m, 6f / Various Sets A hilarious take off on American films, especially from the 1930s through the 1970s. The principals play a variety of characters. There is a Cagney Bogart Dean Brando type-- and a Fonda Stewart Peck Perkins type. The women, too, are types-- basically Bette Davis, Loretta Young and Eve Arden. The parts they play are wild parodies from many Hollywood genres; a silent tearjerker, slum idyll, gangster epic, courtroom melodrama, chain gang social justice thriller, screwball comedy, Busby Berkeley backstage musical, war propaganda canteen musical-- not to forget...

Christopher Durang has been called "Jonathan Swift's nicer, younger brother" ("The New York Observer"). His plays are known for containing hilarity at every turn and revealing social commentary in every corner. Now collected in "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Other Political Plays" are Durang's most revealing political and social satires.
"Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them" tells the story of a young woman in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father's hobby of butterfly collecting...

Winner of the 2013 Tony Award(r) for Best Play
Winner of the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best Play
Winner of the Drama League Award for Best Production of a Play
Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Best Play
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Production
Winner of the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play
Nominated for six Tony Awards(r), "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is one of the most lauded and beloved Broadway plays of recent years. Vanya and his adopted sister Sonia live a quiet life in the Pennsylvania farmhouse where they grew up,...