When the tightrope is walked, Durang’s tone can achieve an accurate description of reality’s chaos. “Insanity is away of coping in this very harsh world. And I think it’s Chris’ way of getting truths out, by being very insane and funny,” says actress Kristine Nielsen, who has acted in three of Durang’s plays and currently stars in “Vanya” as Sonia. “The pain of the character is funny because it’s a recognizable pain we all have in trying to cope.”

I can still recall the first time I recognized this pain, to put it in Nielsen’s terms. In 2008, I saw Durang’s most famous play, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.” Its genre-breaking marriage of hilarity and heartbreak will always remind me of moments in my life when I have wanted to laugh at how the answer to the question “Can this get worse?” is yes.

When he wrote “Bette and Boo,” Durang was a graduate student at Yale staying at Edward Albee’s residence for young writers. The play started as a writing exercise. Fellow student Innaurato recommended Durang write about his family. He did, but he intended it only to be an exercise and didn’t even change the names. Durang showed the play, at the time a one-act, to his professor Howard Stein, who in turn showed it to a director at the Yale School of Drama, who wanted to stage it. Durang consented and changed some of the names. He thought his family, based in New Jersey, would never hear about the New Haven production.

But Durang’s mother heard about a subsequent production in Princeton, New Jersey. His parents were always supportive of his writing, but Durang had his reservations about her seeing it. It’s not hard to understand why—the play is the most autobiographical of his works, telling the story of his parents’ relationship, his own upbringing, and his mother’s stillbirths. “When I was thinking about writing about the deaths of these children, I thought, if one wrote a serious dead-on version, it would seem like a TV movie. So I just found myself with no real thought to it, the doctor came in and dropped it. Then he gets to say, ‘Oh no, it’s not dead,’ which allows the audience to get over that shock the first time. The second time, when the baby now actually is dead, the audience laughs. But then they have a discussion about why it is dead,” Durang says.

The third and the fourth are not intended to be humorous. The sound of each “baby”—the Roundabout production employed sandbags to amplify the thud—hitting the stage registered more in my chest than my ears. Innocent Bette’s grief transforms her from zany to delirious. Her gravy-vacuuming, alcoholic husband Boo—the actual nickname of Durang’s father—fares no better. The only living child, Matt, attempts to a live a normal life between the thuds of each stillborn and watches the marriage disintegrate.

Durang’s mother wanted to see the play even after he showed her the script. She told Durang after the show that she enjoyed it. “She said, ‘I think you’re a little easy on your father. But on the other hand, he was sweet.’… And then she said, ‘But I think you got the rest of your family exactly right,’ which made me really happy because her family in particular always lived in terror of ‘Marriage of Bette and Boo,’” Durang says. His mother died of cancer before the full-length version was produced, making Durang especially grateful for her blessing.

In 1985, Durang had a personal and artistic breakthrough. He had acted in his own plays before, but given the autobiographical content Durang made a noteworthy decision to act in the play’s debut, directed by Jerry Zaks. He chose the role of Matt, his obvious stand-in. The play is fictionalized, but some scenes are lifted directly from his life. “The first preview while I was speaking, my voice choked up,” says Durang. “I was so startled. It had not happened in rehearsal at all.… I did ask Jerry Zaks if that was okay. He said, ‘That’s okay as long as you don’t stop. You have to keep going.’ It didn’t happen all the time. But that was powerful.”

I wasn’t alive to see that incarnation of “Bette and Boo,” to watch Durang essentially reenact crucial moments of his life under professional lights, uttering perfect, preassembled words. To write the contents of one’s life, let alone speak them in front of others under a thin veil of fiction, is terrifying to an emerging playwright such as myself. But this goes beyond therapy or catharsis for Durang’s sake. There was something larger at work when Durang spoke to the audience directly as Matt and said, “Bette passed into death, and is with God. She is in heaven where she has been reunited with the four dead babies, and where she waits for Boo, and for Bonnie Wilson, and Emily, and Pooh Bear and Eeyore, and Kanga and Roo; and for me.”

“I found his performance in that so affecting that I didn’t really talk about it much with him,” Martin says. “The end of that play affected me more than almost anything I had seen in that period of my life.”

HOW TO END IT ALL

Durang tries to recall which character from “The Canterbury Tales” he chose for an assignment he had to make up during his rough patches at Harvard.

“Knowing you, it had to be the Wife of Bath,” I say.

He replies with a grin, “You’re right.  You’re absolutely right.” (I silently rejoice at my nerdy feat.)

At some plot point between his academic struggles and this moment in Utopia Diner, the Broadway playwright and co-director of the Juilliard playwriting program—to which I may someday apply—fleshed out his dark, brutal streak and tempered it. “I do think in my early plays I had a very nihilistic view of life, and it really came out an awful lot in my plays,” Durang says. “So the people who either felt the same or just went along for the ride liked it, but other people felt disturbed while the play didn’t actually say, ‘Yes I know this is serious.’ So that part of me seems gone now.”

After our interview, Durang—a self-described “agnostic question-mark” even after all he has been through and all the Catholic jokes—will go home to his house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and his partner of over 20 years, John Augustine. But before he does, I have to ask him about the optimistic ending of a recent work that gives me the most trouble.