Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays
by Christopher Durang
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher DurangEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-12
ISBN: 0802131301
Number of pages: 166
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays
Book Review: "I want Dr. Ruth and Mother Theresa to fight to the death in the Coliseum."
Summary: 5 Stars
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
Summary of Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays
“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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