American playwright Christopher Durang was BOTD in 1949. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, he studied at Harvard and the Yale School of Drama, where he befriended fellow student Sigourney Weaver. His breakthrough came with the 1979 comedy Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, winning the Obie Award for best off-Broadway play, followed by the sex comedy Beyond Therapy, calamitously filmed by Robert Altman in 1987. Many of his plays satirise classics of the literary canon, including For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a parody of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. After a fallow period during the 1990s where he wrote (mostly unsuccessfully) for film and television, he returned to Broadway success with his 2005 play Miss Witherspoon, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, loosely based on the plays of Anton Chekhov, premiered on Broadway in 2013, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. Durang lives in Pennsylvania with his husband, the actor and playwright John Augustine.