Durang & Weaver: The Master and His Muse, Reunited

By Harry Haun
04 Dec 2012

Christopher Durang and Sigourney Weaver
Christopher Durang and Sigourney Weaver
Photo by Monica Simoes

Christopher Durang and Sigourney Weaver had a serendipitous meeting at Yale in the '70s. Almost 40 years later, the Lunt-Fontanne copycats reunite for Chekhov, sorta, at Lincoln Center Theater.

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It took Christopher Durang a full week at Yale School of Drama to find his muse. Oh, he had seen the striking, statuesque brunette in the cafeteria line at the Hall of Graduate Studies, but it wasn't until Sigourney Weaver read some of his stuff in a class that mixed playwrights with first-year actors that he knew she was the one.

By December of that semester she was starring in the Yale Cabaret in his one-act Better Dead Than Sorry, a crackpot play about a troubled musical-theatre family, in which she was the sister who sang the title song while undergoing shock treatment. She remembers it well and beams, "I made my own shock-treatment hat — out of tinfoil."

During rehearsal the actor playing her brother dropped out and Durang dropped in, beginning their long onstage relationship. "I was cast with her in plays I didn't write for the next two years. At the end of the first year the singing class put on a cabaret, and Sigourney and I sang 'Two Lost Souls' from Damn Yankees. We did it very deadpan, sitting, but, at one point, we stood up, and our height difference got a huge laugh. I'm 5-foot-7 and she says she's 5-foot-11 — but, put her in heels and there she goes."

Their latest collaboration — he at the keyboard, she at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater — is Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a what's-wrong-with-this-picture? title that promises a contemporary twisting of Chekhov. The first three characters (David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen, and Weaver) are the offspring of college profs with a passion for Chekhov, and they're butting heads over the future of the family's Bucks County manse. Spike (Billy Magnussen) is the boy-toy of Masha, a famed actress plotting to pull the rug out from under her siblings.

 

Billy Magnussen and Sigourney Weaver in Vanya and Sonia.
photo by T. Charles Erickson

"It's not in any way a satire of Chekhov," Weaver is quick to caution. "It's really a Durang play that is also about many of the same Chekhovian themes, but it ends on a more tender and optimistic note. There is some despair in the play, yes, but it doesn't end in despair, as some (even very funny) Chekhovian plays do."

This, to date, is as close as she has come to doing one of those plays. "I've seen so much Chekhov over my life and been asked to play Chekhov so many times I feel like I've done him constantly, but, for whatever reasons, I haven't, so this is a nice entry."

She has figured out she has that in common with Masha, who, waylaid by success, is likewise Chekhov-free. "She had dreams, I think, of being a great Chekhovian stage actress and then was cast — and, I guess, she did a good job — in this movie about a serial killer. She made a string of those movies, and that sorta becomes who she is."

 Continued...