One last thing: In the play, Vanya is worried about climate change and global warming and whether the planet ultimately would survive. A few times during the run we had to temporarily cut or change lines about the weather, because some actual natural disaster had happened, and what had been a funny exaggeration in the play was no longer funny or an exaggeration. (Chris can be Cassandra-like in his ability to predict what’s about to happen in the world.)

If you’re reading this, then the world hasn’t come to an end. But if it’s about to, and you’ve chosen to spend your last minutes reading Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, then good for you. What a way to go.

Sigourney Weaver's Speech

Sigourney Weaver’s Speech Introducing Christopher Durang at the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards

May 12, 2013

Hi, Everyone,

I am delighted to be here with all of you to award the New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s Best Play of 2013 to this playwright I’ve kind of heard of—Christopher Durang. It is an inspired and thrilling choice. I went online to see who else had won this very prestigious award, and the list is dazzling … monumental writers who created our cultural landscape and are the reason many of us fell in love with the theater in the first place: O’Neill, Williams, Inge, Miller, Guare, Albee, Stoppard, Wilson, Vogel, Wasserstein, and now there at the end is Chris’s name for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and it looks so right there.

And if I may—there are not too many laugh-out-loud comedies on this list. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—okay. Neil Simon won once for Brighton Beach Memoirs, but I can’t remember if that’s one of his funny plays. And certainly there is no mention from the old days of Kaufman and Hart, or the great Thornton Wilder, with whom Durang shares a kinship. Imagine how Wilder would have enjoyed Miss Witherspoon!

Comedy is often dismissed as the lesser genre. Of course it’s actually more difficult to write a great comedy. As Chris mentioned in an interview—in 1959 the film Some Like It Hot received no Oscar nominations while Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards. And which one would you rather see today?

Molière was derided as a sketch writer because of his love for commedia dell ’arte. But I don’t see a lot of Corneille and Racine being done these days, and Moliere is packing people into theaters all over the world.

Chris writes about things that matter deeply to him. And I must tell you that we have so many young people, from teens to twentysomethings, for whom Durang is it. He speaks for them as well as for all of us who remember the happy tedium of licking stamps and dialing a telephone.