THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When I read Christopher Durang’s comedy The Nature and Purpose of the Universe a few days before seeing Transient Theatre’s current production, I hardly cracked a smile. “This isn’t funny,” I thought, “this is sick.” Here was a play that told no coherent story, that presented instead a series of vaguely related vignettes about Eleanor Mann, a patient, long-suffering woman who is physically and emotionally abused by her family and friends (and even total strangers). Here was a playwright trying to squeeze laughs out of tragic events in Eleanor’s life–the breakdown of her marriage, the accidental castration of her youngest son–and openly mocking Eleanor for her faith (and by extension all Catholics) by having a pair of angels instigate most of Eleanor’s misfortunes.
Durang seems aware of the danger of this in his work. He points out in a note to the published play: “Eleanor’s plight must be presented sympathetically so we care about her, and yet her suffering must be sufficiently distanced and/or theatricalized . . . so that we can find it funny.” Such advice, however, only begs the question “What’s funny about all this suffering?”
“All our prayers are answered,” Sister Mary Ignatius tells us in another of Durang’s plays. “It’s just that sometimes the answer is no.” Thus Durang’s Catholic twist on Brooks’s definition: Tragedy is when God says no to my prayers; comedy is when he says no to yours.
