American Nights

David Mamet and Sam Shepard both had painful, difficult childhoods, but if we were to offer a prize for the American Dramatist With the Worst Upbringing the winner would probably be Christopher Durang, who remembers his formative years consisting of people being “horrible to each other over and over and over”. He’s known in this country for Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All, which celebrates the killer nun who put him off Catholicism, and Beyond Therapy, which lambasts psychiatrists and psychobabble. We’re less familiar with his Baby with the Bathwater, which is about spiritual destruction within the nuclear family, and ’dentity, the first half of the scathing, scorching double bill that the King’s Head calls American Nights.

This time the protagonist is a suicidal girl, the victim of an uncaring mother who insists she plays the flute, a dim shrink who keeps changing sex, and a man who is variously her reproachful father, her senile grandfather, a brother with incestuous designs on her mum and the French count who also becomes the lady’s lover. It’s a bit dreamlike, as is often the case with Durang’s work – which is much indebted to R. D. Laing, who believed that families played havoc with sensitive minds, and has a cartoon bluntness and ferocity missing in the more sophisticated plays of Mamet and Shepard.