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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.54
EAN num: 9780802131300
ISBN number: 0802131301
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 166
Printing Date: January 12, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 94785
Studio: Grove Press
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“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Durang’s Laughing Wild (which takes its title from this Thomas Gray quotation via Samuel Beckett) and the previously unpublished Baby with the Bathwater.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 clichés of self-affirmation he learns at his “personality workshop,” they run the gamut of everyday life’s small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous inevitability, at the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park.
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Rated by buyers 
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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
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I would recommend this play for anyone who likes Christopher Durang. Both plays are good for any project that you would need a comedic play and/or playwrite. A must have for any drama or modern studies student.
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These 2 plays are full of excellent monologues and/or scenes that work well for acting presentations. They are full of modern humor.
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Laughing Wild is an extraordinary journey of two people into the thinly crusted underworld of anguish and madness both they - and many of us - are struggling to keep at bay. The catalyst - an aisle in a supermarket - the weapon at hand: a tin of tuna. People negotiating with themselves, and others in a user-unfriendly environment, the overpopulated Metropolis, where normality, or at least the semblance of such, is paramount. What both characters remind us, hopefully, is the absurdity of modern life and the bravery of those social lepers who are "out there" - willing and able to acess their feelings, no matter how socially unacceptable. We laugh at "the lunatic woman" - but we also envy her and wish we had the courage to voice those things we only think. The borders of what I think of as sane and loony became very blurred in this play. Thank you, Mr Durang, for that.
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LAUGING WILDE is the best play by Durang that I've read or seen. I usually find his plays sort of sad, with terrible bitterness at the heart of them, that, even though they're usually terribly funny, you sort of leave feeling bad that Durang is so unhappy. I've appeared as George in ACTORTS NIGHTMARE more than once, and, like most of his plays, they have these great lead ups to sort of really sad endings.
LAUGING... on the other hand gives us two characters (two very eighties characters, based on their references to Reagan and the Meese Commition) who's feelings, though in a dated context, are so relevent now to how so many people feel about the world.
The Woman's monolgue at the beginning is so wonderfully crazy and hysterical and sort of touching - this is a great peice for a great actress who understands levels and life - its so perfectly written. The Man's monologue is just so touchingly written, without being sappy, that it makes you really sit there and say - "yes! this is what I feel, too!"... at least I do.
And bringing them together in the second act is so well done - and by the end... well, what do you know, Durang gives us an ending that has hope. No bitterness. Hope. I love it.
Not the best play I've ever read, but really well done.
BABY... has one of the funniest very first acts of any play I know, but sort of winds up with that bitter Durang ending that always makes me feel bad for him.
Despite this, he's one of the best absurdist playwrights today, its no wonder his plays are so popular.
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