Has it really been almost 40 years since I saw (three times!) at the Public Theater THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO written by and featuring Christopher Durang, who died yesterday. Life-changing play for me. What can you say about a play that introduces you to Joan Allen, Mercedes Ruehl, and Olympia Dukakis in one fell swoop? Perhaps the ultimate “crazy family play,” a genre in which I’m currently struggling to write and so reaching back for inspiration. Among many favorite moments: Boo’s mother, Soot, responding to her husband’s repeated, vicious verbal abuse: “Oh, Karl!” Bette struggling over a carpet stain: “You can’t vacuum gravy!” Bette’s guilt-ridden younger sister Emily: “Mother, is ‘my own stupidity’ hyphenated?” And my favorite, older sister Joan to her father’s corpse at his wake: “You were right about the Greeks, Pop!” Rest in peace to a great American playwright.
Richard Willett
Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.