“What we wouldn’t give to belong to some, if not all, of the salons and places that welcomed, as meeting places that they were, all those creators who today fill our interest…” wrote the historian Mary Ann Caws in the prologue to his book Creative Encounters, dedicated to those spaces of internal contact in the world of culture that, promoting the exchange of ideas, have enriched the literature and art of each era and the trajectories of those who coincided in them.
A wonderful example of this type of enclave, which Caws does not address in his book, was provided by the Yale University School of Drama.
On April 2, Cristopher Durang, one of the most famous contemporary American playwrights, winner of a Tony Award, the most outstanding in his discipline, died at his home in Pipersville, Pennsylvania.
Cultivator of black comedy; critical of the Catholic Church, in whose schools he was educated; gay power activist, one of his first hits on off-Broadway was the satirical piece Das Lusitania Review. In a leading role was her former Yale classmate Sigourney Weaver, still far from being Lieutenant Ripley from Alien and one of the greats of contemporary Hollywood.
An already very famous Weaver would appear again years later in another of Durang’s biggest hits, the 2012 comedy-homage to Chekhov Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
In Spain, the playwright’s work has been seen little: Charo López and Javier Gurruchaga performed Wild Laughter, and some independent company Terapias (filmed by Robert Altman in a “horrible” version according to the author).
Durang wrote several film scripts – The Secret of My Success, Wife by Surprise… In one that was never filmed, he had as co-writer Wendy Wasserman, another pillar of playwriting, also a former classmate at the University of New Haven.
Wasserman, who died at the age of 55 in 2006, won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her work The Heidi Chronicles, which follows the trajectory of a conscientious American woman from her school days in the sixties to her professional achievement, addressing feminist affirmation. , the spread of AIDS, motherhood and adoption, in a tone of dramatic comedy influenced by Neil Simon and the classics of Jewish humor.
Despite Wasserman’s preeminence on American stages, with this and other works such as Old Money or An American Daughter, he has not had much presence in Spain either.
Durang, Wasserman and Weaver had headed to the Yale school attracted by the fame of director Robert Brustein, former theater critic, devotee of Bertolt Brecht, friend of Lilian Hellman and Joseph Heller.
They all immediately recognized that a student in their class was the most brilliant performer they had ever seen. Meryl Streep seemed “more flexible, more agile, she had greater control over her body than all of us,” said another colleague of the time. Performing comedy or drama, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Jean Genet or Gorky, the term “doing a Streep” soon circulated: “Going on stage. Master the character. Make them look at you,” according to her biographer Michael Schulman.
Durang, Weaber and the recent Cannes Palme d’Or winner performed The Frogs, an adaptation of Aristophanes with music by Stephen Sondheim, at the Yale Repertory Theatre. His and Wasserman’s trajectories would often converge after leaving school, especially in projects for the New York theater world. The friendship and trust forged in his youth had left their mark.
“The talents that coincided at the Yale School of Dramatic Arts between 1972 and 1975 turned those years into the undisputed golden age of the school,” Schulman remarks. And without a doubt also at an interesting moment in contemporary cultural life. What happened so that two great playwrights and two very powerful movie stars emerged from those classrooms and its Repertory Theater? Would they have emerged and developed their careers with similar brilliance without the three years spent there? We will never know.
