Idiots redux

Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato invade the ART

by Anne Marie Donahue

Playwright Albert Innaurato couldn't be more surprised at the prescience of The Idiots Karamazov, the wacky musical send-up of Western literature he penned with Christopher Durang 25 years ago. "I was amazed when I read through this latest version of the play," he says of the antic and irreverent Cuisinarting of Russian literary giants with such odd mix-ins as Anaïs Nin, Eugene O'Neill, and Charles Dickens that is being revived by the American Repertory Theatre beginning next week. "Totally unintentionally, we forecast, in a lot of ways, things that have actually happened. I think the play is really about the collapse of the Western canon, and about how everything's permitted. There's even a song in there called `Everything's Permitted,' which is a line from Dostoyevsky."

Asked how the Idiots Karamazov collaboration came about, Durang explains that he and Innaurato forged their partnership while in graduate school at the Yale School of Drama, where the two studied playwriting from 1971 to 1974. "We both came from Catholic backgrounds and tended to have nuns in our plays. So, the first month or so, he and I were kind of sizing each other up and wondering, `Is this school big enough for both of us?' But after that initial wariness of one another, we went on to become very good friends during our time there."

Although both playwrights agree that they shared a passion for parody and a somewhat cynical turn of mind, they give differing accounts of the reactions elicited by the first show they wrote and performed together, a cabaret piece called I Don't Generally Like Poetry But Have You Read "Trees"? "It had a weird Catholic tinge to it," Durang recalls of the piece. "It was strange, supposedly a poetry presentation of the work of William Blake and Thomas Gray triggered by an exhibition at the Yale art museum of the drawings that Blake, better known as a poet, had done for his fellow poet.

"Anyway, it was a very crackpot thing. After reading a bit of poetry, purposely badly, we then said that Blake and Gray met in a summer-stock production of The Glass Menagerie. Albert, who's a large and boisterous person, played a very loud-mouthed Amanda. I'm much shorter and quieter, and I limped around playing Laura. The weird non sequitur we added to it was that he dressed in a priest's High Mass outfit and I wore monk's robes. So it was a very crazy sketch. And there was another where we were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt." Durang, laughing, concedes that folks at the Yale art museum "didn't know what they were getting into," but he adds that the head of playwriting at the drama school "thought it was hilarious" and invited the duo to reprise the piece in the student cabaret.

Innaurato recalls the museum show somewhat differently. "We got in trouble, but then we were always getting in trouble. They tried to expel us after that first show, because we offended everyone there." In addition to the aforementioned sketches, he says, they also sang the Catholic Mass to the score of Cabaret. "So everybody was deeply, deeply offended, and they tried to get us expelled and wrote letters to Robert Brustein [the ART head, who was then dean of the Yale School of Drama]. It was actually quite a scandal. I don't remember exactly what happened; I think we were put on probation. But we didn't take it seriously. We just thought it was a goof."

Asked why that first cabaret elicited such shock, Innaurato points out that "it was a weird time, a much more repressed time than today is. Everything was closeted, and I don't mean only homosexuality. All kinds of no-nos were not talked about. So, of course, in The Idiots Karamazov, we did nothing but talk about no-nos. But we did it in this kind of goofy way, so that half of the audience just thought it was funny while the other was kind of offended that we were talking in a mocking way about religion, literature, scholarship, and every kind of sexual relationship. That was in the first version."

Like their initial collaboration, The Idiots Karamazov was performed by the playwrights in a student cabaret. Again, says Innaurato, he and Durang were threatened with expulsion. "But we were kind of rescued from being thrown out when Brustein decided to do it at the drama school, which is where Meryl Streep came into it. [She played the role of the crazed translator Constance Garnett, who is portrayed in the ART revival by Thomas Derrah.] We had to do a lot of rewriting, and the play got much better. Of course, Meryl was phenomenal in the role, and the show was so successful that Brustein decided to do it at Yale Rep, with Meryl again, and Chris in the role of Alyosha [Karamazov]."

Since that 1975 production, says Innaurato, he and Durang have rewritten the piece (which includes music by Peter Golub, with lyrics by Durang) several times. "The first show was total chaos; it was a circus. The latest is very different, much more chosen." According to Durang, however, the changes he's made for the ART revival were largely aimed at recapturing the feel of the initial 1974 Yale production. "I think that when the play works, the way it did in the student production, there's some strange meaning that people feel about this explosion of literature, this strange juxtaposition of themes in this crazy, comic way."

The Idiots Karamazov plays in repertory at the Loeb Drama Center December 10 through January 16. Tickets are $24 to $57. Call 547-8300.