Durang Durang

Christopher Durang credits his interest in theater to, of all peopie, Betsy Palmer, who starred in the Paper Mill Playhouse musicals he saw as a child. Want another one? The first play he wrote was an episode for I Love Lucy. "It was produced," he says, "in second-grade class." Like his plays, Durang's life is filled with non sequiturs and angst-tinged hilarity. Just for perversity's sake, the gifted thirtyeight-year-old author of Sister Mary Ignatius, Beyond Therapy, and The Marriage of Bette and Boo often tells New York cabdrivers that he's a secretary for a literary agent. "But once," he says, "I was too tired to lie, so I said, T'm a writer,' thinking he wasn't the type that would know." But the cabbie figured out whom he was talking to, and rather than ask for an autograph, he launched into a bitter harangue about how sick Durang's plays are. A true slice of life. But, for those who prefer their sick but pingy (his word) twists on the stage, there's Durang's latest, Laughing Wild, a two-character, more-political-than-usual work at Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons.

MICHAEL MUSTO