Playwright Christopher Durang Reveals Diagnosis With Aphasia

Tony Award-winning Playwright Christopher Durang has been diagnosed with logopenic primary progressive aphasia (PPA), BroadwayWorld has learned. Durang's family and friends shared the news exclusively with Broadway News.

According to the Weill Institute For Neurosciences, persons with logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia "have increasing trouble thinking of the words they want to say. As time goes on, people with lvPPA have more trouble getting the words out, and they eventually begin to speak slower and slower."

The first signs of the illness surfaced in Durang in 2012, and he was officially diagnosed in 2016. His husband, John Augustine, shared that Durang's long-term memory is intact but he has difficulty producing and comprehending speech, and struggles to follow long sentences. Otherwise, he is physically unaffected, and still has his motor skills and executive functioning.

Read the original story on Broadway News.

Christopher Durang is a playwright whose plays include A History of the American Film (Tony nomination, Best Book of a Musical, 1978), The Actor's Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (Obie award; off-Bway run 1981-83), Beyond Therapy (on Broadway in 1982, with Dianne Wiest and John Lithgow), Baby with the Bathwater (Playwrights Horizons, 1983), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Public Theatre, 1985; Obie award, Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Award), Laughing Wild (Playwrights Horizons, 1987), Durang/Durang (an evening of six plays at Manhattan Theatre Club, 1994, including the Tennessee Williams' parody, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls), Sex and Longing (Lincoln Center Theatre production at the Cort Theatre, 1996, starring Sigourney Weaver), and Betty's Summer Vacation (Playwrights Horizons, 1999; Obie award). He also won the 2013 Best Play Tony Award for his comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

His most recent works are Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge, which premiered at City Theatre in Pittsburgh in 2002. And the musical Adrift in Macao, with music by Peter Melnick and book and lyrics by Durang, which premiered at New York Stage and Film in summer 2002, and is under option for off-Broadway 2003-04.

Durang is also a performer, and acted with E. Katherine Kerr in the N.Y. premiere of Laughing Wild, and with Jean Smart in the L.A. production. He shared in an acting ensemble Obie for The Marriage of Bette and Boo; and with John Augustine and Sherry Anderson has performed his crackpot cabaret Chris Durang and Dawne at the Criterion Center, Caroline's Comedy Club, Williamstown Summer Cabaret, and the Triad, winning a 1996 Bistro Award.