BEYOND THERAPY
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Despite the fact that Christopher Durang has written only two plays that directly confront his Catholic upbringing–The Nature and Purpose of the Universe and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You–Durang will always be a Catholic writer. Or, more precisely, he will always be a lapsed-Catholic writer. Even those plays of his apparently least concerned with the Catholic church, like A History of the American Film, or the play currently under consideration, Beyond Therapy, contain the sort of conflicted feelings about authority figures and systems of belief, and the half-acknowledged yearning for a universe over which someone is watching and judging, that one would expect from a product of the Church.
Unlike Durang in some of his more vicious comedies, for example The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, which bristles with all the pent-up anger of a conflicted adolescent trying to break away from his family, the playwright didn’t create this cast of characters just to make fun of them. His message is much more good-hearted. As Charlotte explains at one point in the play: “We’re all alone, everyone is crazy, and you have no choice but to be alone or to be with someone in what will be a highly imperfect and probably eventually unsatisfactory relationship.”
