Word: durang
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title of Durang's latest work, a perversion (in both senses of the word) of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, seems almost chosen at random from the list of novels that it references. The basic plot of Dostoevsky's famous meditation on being and nothingness (long before Sartre took the patent out on those themes) serves as the starting point of the Durang/Innaurato collaboration: four brothers, tempestuous love, life, death, etc, etc. But it doesn't take long to leave Dostoevsky in the dust as Durang and Innaurato jump full force into the whole of literature since the Book...
...guide for this trip (and I do mean trip) through history and literature is the eminent 19th-century translator of Russian literature Constance Garnett, whose unrelenting Englishness (read: priggishness) has been a scourge to modern translators from Nabokov on. Fashioned by Durang as a kind of Charles Kinbote for the entire Western cannon, Garnett is as much a mangler of Russian literature as a scholar of it. (The Russian word for frustrated homosexual is Peter Tchaikovsky, she says). Played with unrelenting and downright hysterical formality by Thomas Derrah, Garnett becomes as loveable as she is overbearing. Listening to her roll...
...heroine-addicted mother of Eugene O'Neil, and the aforementioned Anas Nin, played with delightfully French self-absorption by Karen MacDonald. Not to mention the entire cast of characters from The Brothers Karamazov, with Alyosha Karamazov (played with effective, i.e. not annoying, wholesomeness by Sean Dugan) serving as Durang's Everyman character in this absurdist romp...
...fiction and drama worth reading. But an experiment in Brechtian musical theater this is not. With love ballads about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being a male nun, Durang's songs are more bizarre than his scripts, if that can be believed. Add to this a text that switches languages as quickly and gleefully as it does literary allusions, and you have what very easily could have been a confusing and tedious wreck of a play...
...energy that it's almost impossible not to get caught up in the sheer joy of the production, even if you can't get that third reference to Freud. But in willing the play into a coherent whole, Coonrod seems to miss at points the sadness that lies beneath Durang's outrageous humor, his underlying pity for characters forced to drag the corpses of their fathers through scene after scene. Their actions may be laughable, but they're not so far from the pains we in the "real" world face every day. But this is a fault that can easily...