Customer Reviews

Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays

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Beyond Therapy is definitely the best play I've ever read by Christopher Durang. Baby With The Bathwater takes a definite second. It's hilarious. Who would have thought I would have so much to laugh about? Especially for something as serious as an identity crisis!

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

Those of you looking for a good play look no further. Christopher Durangs Laughing Wild and Baby With the Bath Water are two of the most comical well written plays i have come across for just the fun of it.Laughing Wild left me in stitches i laughed so hard! If you are an actor looking for monologues or scenes to work with for comedy these two pieces are filled with great work and varieties of character to work with.

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 access 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.

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.

Baby with Bathwater and Laughing Wild are two of Christopher Durang's most well written plays. Baby with Bathwater, while missing my specific comedic sense, was filled with one-liners and gags that made me laugh uncontrollably. Laughing Wild, however, is Durang's best work since Actor's Nightmare. It perfectly captures the attitude of two post-therapy, pre-intitutionalized loons and their individual quest for happiness. The blending of the two tales masterfully guides the reader, or audience into the neurotic lives of these two people. You find yourself identifing with them and cheering them on. This book is a must read for Durang fans and for anyone who enjoys comedy.

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 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.

These 2 plays are full of excellent monologues and/or scenes that work well for acting presentations. They are full of modern humor.

Right before I left for college, when I was in my combat boots, fishnet tights, and park ranger hat phase, I went with my mother to Cambridge, MA for the National High School Theater convention. (Our play, for which I was the bitter disgruntled light person, was so bad that even to mention it in the same paragraph with Christopher Durang is something of an insult.) Anyway, I'd read Baby With the Bathwater and seen Laughing Wild and at 16 I was convinced that they were the most brilliant, hysterical, heartbreaking pieces of theater ever in the whole of human history. (When I was 18 I stumbled upon Aristophanes and Euripides and THAT was all over, but hey, not everyone can be Aristophanes or Euripides after all.) Anyways, Durang, I mean, where else are you going to find Oedipal dreams about your father inside your baked potato? The man IS a genius. So, I was in Cambridge with my Mom and I saw that Baby With the Bathwater was playing at a local theater and convinced her that her life would remain eternally unfulfilled unless she (we) went to go see it. So off we went. And oh boy did it go. Like off the deep end. Baby With the Bathwater is basically Phillip Larkin's This Be The Verse (They "mess" you up your mum and dad. They do not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you...)extended to play length with a generous helping of the bizarre mixed in there. i.e. NOT A GOOD PLAY TO SEE WITH YOUR MOTHER, especially if your mother has a "bad mom" complex. So, she thought I'd dragged her to this to make some sort of devious comment on her parenting, while I was innocently and totally enthralled by the bizarre notion of not checking the sex of your baby becaue you don't want to invade it's privacy and the cool lighting. So, afterward she freaks out and we have to have this long ole' mother/daughter talk where she had to tell me how sucky a mom she thought she was and I had to reassure her that she didn't mess me up too bad and we ate clam chowder. Though no one got hit on the head with a tuna fihs can andwe never once talked about Sally Jesse Rafael's glasses, it was a perfect example of life mirroring art, or life mirroring Christopher Durang. Take your pick.

The story line is of two disk jockeys in the 1950's who decide to find the next teen singing sensation. This tired story line has a predictable ending: the vixen they discover ends up trashing her mentors, and they end up back in their original jobs. The characterization is flat, the jokes are stale, and the pace is dreary. Miss this one by all means.