The Marriage of Bette and Boo

As the play begins Bette and Boo are being united in matrimony,
surrounded by their beaming families

But as the further progress of their marriage is chronicled it becomes increasingly clear that things are not working out quite as hoped for. The birth of their son is followed by a succession of stillborns

Boo takes to drink; and their respective families are odd lots to say the least. His father is a sadistic tyrant, who refers to his wife as the dumbest woman in the world

while Bette’s side includes a psychotic sister who endures lifelong agonies over her imagined transgressions and a senile father who mutters in unintelligible gibberish

For solace and counsel they all turn to Father Donnally, a Roman Catholic priest who dodges their questions by impersonating a strip of frying bacon

Conveyed in a series of dazzlingly inventive interconnected scenes, the play moves wickedly on through three decades of divorce, alcoholism, madness and fatal illness, all treated with a farcical brilliance through the author’s unique talent

Winner of the Obie Award

“Once more he is demonstrating his special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy” — NY Times

“…Durang has the ability of making the real absurd and the absurd real” — NY Post

“Christopher Durang, the humorist and satirist, has rarely written anything funnier or more serious than his mordant comedy THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO… a brimming cornucopia of brilliant lines” — The New Yorker