Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays Paperback – January 12, 1994

I think Durang is a genius!

funny

I have no idea what I just read, but the quality of the book itself is just fine.

Always fiercely satiric, Christopher Durang fills his plays with outrage and absurdity, creating moods that vary from anger to sadness and from hilarity to the darkest, most mordant humor, sometimes within the same play. In these two plays from the 1980s, Laughing Wild (1988) and Baby with the Bathwater (1984), both said to be semi-autobiographical, Durang features a young man who speaks to the audience directly, instead of appearing in dramatic, interactive scenes with other characters, as in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All (1979) and in The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985).Laughing Wild opens with a monologue by "Woman," recently released from an institution, someone who has had a tantrum because she could not reach the tuna fish in a supermarket--a man was blocking her way. With her raucous laugh, she tells us, among other things, that she has also had an altercation with a taxi driver, has fallen in the gutter, and has not read Bleak House. Act II features a monologue by Man, a writer (played in New York by the author himself), who has recently had a confrontation with a woman in the tuna fish aisle.As he tells about his own life and problems, his bisexuality, and the Catholic church's attitudes and pronouncements, we see him recognizing life's common absurdities. In Act III, Man and Woman reveal their identical dreams and hopes in parallel monologues. Sad, but hilariously satiric of eighties attitudes and self-help movements, Laughing Wild ultimately shows the loneliness of contemporary 1980s life.Baby With the Bathwater begins as a farce about parenthood by two people who do not have a clue. Their little boy, named Daisy, wears dresses as a child and is unsuccessful in forming any life plans, with Durang satirizing the writer-mother, the unemployed father who crouches beside the refrigerator, and their self-absorption. Daisy is on his own in figuring out who he is and who he may become, speaking to the audience directly at the end of the play.Over-the-top exaggerations of real life attitudes and events, farce-like humor, and biting satire make Durang's plays memorable and disquieting events, and these two plays, less famous than his Obie-award winners (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All, and Marriage of Bette and Boo) show his more personal, less interactive style of playwriting with its smaller, more intimate focus."Afterwords" for both plays provide Durang's comments on these productions. Particularly fascinating is his evaluation of the New York theater scene and his belief that "His Pontiff Rich" (NYTimes drama critic Frank Rich) has absolute power. n Mary Whipple

Right before I left for college, when I was in my combat boots, fishnet tights, and park ranger hat phase, I went with my mother to Cambridge, MA for the National High School Theater convention. (Our play, for which I was the bitter disgruntled light person, was so bad that even to mention it in the same paragraph with Christopher Durang is something of an insult.) Anyway, I'd read Baby With the Bathwater and seen Laughing Wild and at 16 I was convinced that they were the most brilliant, hysterical, heartbreaking pieces of theater ever in the whole of human history. (When I was 18 I stumbled upon Aristophanes and Euripides and THAT was all over, but hey, not everyone can be Aristophanes or Euripides after all.) Anyways, Durang, I mean, where else are you going to find Oedipal dreams about your father inside your baked potato? The man IS a genius. So, I was in Cambridge with my Mom and I saw that Baby With the Bathwater was playing at a local theater and convinced her that her life would remain eternally unfulfilled unless she (we) went to go see it. So off we went. And oh boy did it go. Like off the deep end. Baby With the Bathwater is basically Phillip Larkin's This Be The Verse (They "mess" you up your mum and dad. They do not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you...)extended to play length with a generous helping of the bizarre mixed in there. i.e. NOT A GOOD PLAY TO SEE WITH YOUR MOTHER, especially if your mother has a "bad mom" complex. So, she thought I'd dragged her to this to make some sort of devious comment on her parenting, while I was innocently and totally enthralled by the bizarre notion of not checking the sex of your baby becaue you don't want to invade it's privacy and the cool lighting. So, afterward she freaks out and we have to have this long ole' mother/daughter talk where she had to tell me how sucky a mom she thought she was and I had to reassure her that she didn't mess me up too bad and we ate clam chowder. Though no one got hit on the head with a tuna fihs can andwe never once talked about Sally Jesse Rafael's glasses, it was a perfect example of life mirroring art, or life mirroring Christopher Durang. Take your pick.

These 2 plays are full of excellent monologues and/or scenes that work well for acting presentations. They are full of modern humor.

This play was one of the most un-inspired and un-inspiring pieces of garbage I have ever had the misfortune of stumbling across. Its non-sensical nature, which is obviously geared to amuse its audience in spite of utter confusion, only leads to disillusionment and mental nausea. Durang is a talentless imp who needs to be banned from his pen.

It's an unusually written play and quite fun to read.