E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dream team Durang explains Laughing Wild for you BY SALLY CRAGIN

Still choirboy cherubic in his mid 50s, noir farceur Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Betty’s Summer Vacation) has settled in at the Huntington Theatre Company to star in his own comedy, Laughing Wild. This two-character work premiered at New York’s Playwrights’ Horizon in 1987; now, says HTC artistic director Nicholas Martin, who helms the production, "Some of the targets are more pertinent than ever."

With Laughing Wild, which also stars Tony winner Debra Monk, Martin directs his first Durang since 2001, when he reprised for the Huntington his Obie-winning staging of Betty’s Summer Vacation. About directing the writer as performer, he enthuses, "I wouldn’t have guessed how much delight there was in acting for him. Chris is unafraid to reveal the frailties we all feel."

Durang burst onto the New York theater scene in the 1970s and ’80s with a quirky collection of absurdist comedies that melded antic plots and a fascination with pop culture with philosophical inquiry and outrage. You’d hardly guess that this modest man with the neatly trimmed silver moustache and beard has such a profound curiosity about the combustible mix of sacred and profane topics that animates his œuvre. Laughing Wild, a three-part work that includes two monologues and an intersecting dream, begins with a pell-mell tirade by the Woman that takes us from a confrontation in the aisle of a grocery store to an examination of the meaning of the work of talk-show host Sally Jessy Raphaël.

Durang explains that the play emerged during a period of his life when he was attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings as a way of coming to grips with his family background. "I found the program like emotional rock and roll. I was having a big reaction to meetings. I once went on Christmas Eve in the afternoon, and it was fascinating but slightly scary."

Meeting formats, in which participants giving lengthy "shares," prompted the Woman’s monologue, which was also fueled by the playwright’s exhaustion with "the intensity" of life in New York and an increased sensitivity to sounds. "Always Con Edison would come and drill at 2 in the morning," he sighs, then adds, "I almost always write when I’m in a good mood. I wrote the Woman’s thing when I had an argument with a friend. I knew I was being unreasonable and I thought, ‘I’m going to write from an unedited point of view.’ "

This "unedited" aspect isn’t lost on Monk. "She’s aware that she talks too much, but I don’t think she can do anything about it. In my life, it’s not the big things that make you crazy; it’s the little things that people do that open up a door to your anger and frustration."

Durang also played the Man in the original production. The character at first seems more centered than his female counterpart — he has a job, writing for a magazine the playwright describes as "sort of a cross between TV Guide and pornography." Durang is conscious of wanting to put distance between his own experience and the Man’s persona. Yet during the Man’s monologue, various Durangian neuroses and tics bubble up. Eventually, a dialogue seemed inevitable. "I wanted the two of them to meet. I always saw it ending badly." Another strand in the play is the writings of Carl Jung, who puts an emphasis on the relevance of dreams. "I thought, what if they were in each other’s dreams?" Throw in a pair of Sally Jessy Raphaël glasses, the Infant of Prague, and the Harmonic Convergence and the laughing only gets wilder.

Laughing Wild is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in the South End, June 3 through 26. Tickets are $14 to $50; call (617) 266-0800 or visit www.huntingtontheater.org or www.BostonTheaterScene.com