Full Length Plays

From Durang:

My play Sex and Longing was presented by Lincoln Center Theatre in 1996, at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. It was disliked by most critics. I think audiences often liked parts of it, especially the first two-thirds. Watching the play during its run though, I could feel that I lost the audience during the last third, regardless of the fine work the actors were doing.

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The play was conceived as a comic epic and was in three acts. There were two topics really – sex and longing (and sexual addiction), as represented by Lulu and her gay friend Justin, who need sex constantly and have published a coffee table book called “Explicit Photographs of the Last 300 People I Slept With”; and the religious right’s seeming desire to write their rigid, anti-sex morality into law when possible, as represented by Brigid McCrea and the Reverend Davidson, who join forces to use Lulu as an example of moral degradation during a congressional hearing.

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The play is not realistically written (Lulu claims to need sex every 15 minutes, and shows up at the Congressional hearing in only a sheet)… but the two themes didn’t merge properly, and the story seemed random in many ways.

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I sometimes run into people who say they liked it; but many more didn’t, truthfully, and I’ve chosen not to have it published, because I don’t think the last third of the play works.

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New York Stage and Film offered me a week’s workshop to work on a rewritten version in 1997; and though it was valuable, I didn’t solve the problems.

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Maybe someday I’ll figure it out. Or maybe I’ll just use certain sections and/or impulses in the play and write something entirely different.