Durang's "Torture" takes a poke at post-9/11 paranoia

Being a playwright isn’t exactly an automatic ticket to The Bigs. Writing the book to "Book of Mormon," though? That's an entirely different matter.

Still some masters of the so-called "straight play" produce work so rich, so affecting and ultimately, so indelible that they become an above-the-credits name. That’s Christopher Durang, whose Absurdist renderings of life (some scenarios culled from his own) have garnered him notice, a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and a reputation as the "master of the random and dysfunctional.”

As the final production of its season, Star Bar Players takes on his 2009 off-Broadway hit “Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them.” It runs this weekend through June 12 at Theatre ’d Art’s new space on North Nevada Avenue.

“Even though I sound angry as we’re speaking, I have to say, weirdly, I wasn’t angry writing it,” Durang told The Washington Post in mid-May, when the play opened there.

The Star Bar Players on the plot: “Christopher Durang’s outrageous, irreverent take on patriotism and paranoia in the post-9/11 world. Felicity awakens one morning with a terrible hangover — and married to a complete stranger: Zamir, whose volatile temper, mysterious activities and indeterminate ethnicity push the Threat Level up to Orange for her and her parents. The insanity escalates with a couple of shadow-government operatives, a sinister butterfly collection and an amateur spy who keeps losing her undies. From Freedom Fries to waterboarding, nothing is sacred in this acerbic, absurd and affectionate insight into an America under attack.”

Director Jonathan Margheim’s take: “I thought it was a really funny script, especially the first three-quarters. It has a lot of biting political satire. It’s interesting because it takes a right turn into (being) very optimistic about the mess we got ourselves into. I told someone, you can almost see the duct tape.”

From The New York Times reviews:

“In Mr. Durang’s world, there is no explanation for misery: Even if one sifts through ‘the endless details of everyday life’ hoping to ‘order reality,’ nothing will make sense.” — Critic Frank Rich in his 1985 review of Durang’s “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”

“Mr. Durang chooses to wear his morality not as a minister’s black robe but as a jester’s crazy motley. There are occasions when this is perfectly correct attire for playwrights of good faith, especially when they’re visiting matters that have started to seem too serious to be taken seriously. Like guns in the hands of angry and irrational people, and torture as a first-resort means of interrogation, and raging paranoia as an accepted worldview.” — Critic Ben Brantley in his 2009 review of “Torture”