Laughing Wild (Christopher Durang)
Folks often talk about us having shorter attention spans, frequently it’s a precursor to either claiming that that is the root cause of all evil in our society, or to excuse some rude thing that person is about to do. I’ve never bought that argument if only because we continue to break financial and attendance records with longer and longer films and the most popular TV is also getting longer with streaming allowing them to be any length they feel is right.
I tend to think what’s happening is that there were always people who didn’t like to sit through a full TV show or movie, but until the last few decades there wasn’t a way to satisfy their natural state. They’re the people who’s entertainment circadian rhythm didn’t fit the strictures we created, but now they can get what they’ve always wanted and so they don’t have to settle.
All of this is prologue to say that Christopher Durang’s play Laughing Wild feels like a TikTok meme that was stretched to be two hours because that’s the length people needed plays to be. And also that I feel vindicated.
That’s not to say it overstays its welcome (but I’m also not not saying that,) just that the form his ideas are playing in feel like it should be a lot shorter, or at least that it could. If I saw this play live it would easily count among the most weird theatrical experiences I ever had (and I’ve seen several Mickle Maher plays.)
Let’s start with the title, because it’s the only handle you’ll have to open this play up: Laughing Wild is a reference to a Beckett play which itself is a reference to a Thomas Gray poem “Laughing Wild amid severest woe.” We’re going to look at characters who feel the pressure of life pressing down on them (for one social, the other political) and try (and fail) to laugh their way through it. Durang also pulls the very Durang move of making the recursive nature of the quote meaningful by playing with perspective and repetition within the play.
So what is this show? The first 36 pages (over half) of the script is spent on two monologues from two disturbed and pessimistic characters, only called Man and Woman. Woman is frayed by life, given to violent outbursts and maniacal laughing. It’s clear that the world is not built for her to succeed, and her enmity towards other people and general unhingedness keep her from finding gainful employment or staying out of the psychiatric ward for too long.
Man is a general depressed sort, frustrated by the politics of the 80’s, especially in regards to AIDS and his status as a bisexual man favoring other men. He looks for meaning and his place in the world and he can’t find it, and can’t appreciate what he has until he does.
Not too long ago Man and Woman had a run in where Man took too long picking out tuna at the grocery and woman attacked him in a fit. During the third act of the show we see increasingly hostile and exaggerated versions of this incident until it’s revealed that both have been sharing this recurring dream. From there Durang careens wildly mixing imagery and lines from both monologues as they share each other’s dreams and continue to grow angrier and more distant, though by the end of the play they accidentally find themselves in sync and working together.
It’s a strange show, and it’s almost as though whoever produced it asked Durang to write a play about what it means to be alive in 1987 since the characters are so focused on the Now that the play feels terribly dated.
I frequently find Durang’s plays to be a slippery eel that sometimes just escape my grasp and sometimes I manage to barely hold onto. Laughing Wildly feels like an eel that got away but that I might catch if I stay on its trail, and I think it’s going to be a work that I’ll appreciate more upon revisiting.
As I sign off I want to say that most playwright’s notes are insipid or condescending and often reveal a person who is nervous about collaboration. Durang has long avoided that problem so I always make time to read his notes. For this volume he spent several pages bemoaning the fact that Frank Rich has a lot of power as a theater critic, and that Rich (and the Times) make Durang’s life harder than it ought to be. A great essay to be sure, but a strange placement for it.
