A response to Derangements
by Bailey Williams

I first encountered Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s Derangements in an anonymous pile of plays. I was reading for the final round of the 2025 Biennial Commission, which asked for work inspired by Christopher Durang, and therefore we were looking for something deranged, I mean, Durangian.

It’s a terrible assignment, actually. Very unfair to ask for ten pages that make us laugh, but have a pulsing undercurrent of darkness that reveal something horrible and true about society-at-large. Ten pages that are so profoundly stupid, they horseshoe back around to brilliance. Savage, but with a painful, beating heart.

Those first ten pages of Derangements are, to me, perfect and perfectly Durangian. Anne Marie and Roxanne sit in a restaurant in 1983 and unbeknownst to them (and the audience) have two entirely separate conversations. This misunderstanding peaks in a moment of comic transcendence as a gay waiter is reluctantly roped in. Anne Marie, shattered by the revelation that Roxanne cannot tell the difference between a normal human interaction and sexual come-on, makes sure her friend is behaving appropriately in her workplace, a pre-school:

When I first read these ten pages, I had no clue who the genius pervert was that wrote them, or what could possibly happen next. How could something so hilarious continue for eighty additional theater minutes?

I was being stupid, because what happens next is actually so obvious: a man flashes Anne Marie and Roxanne, which impregnates Roxanne and demolishes Anne Marie’s frontal lobe, so she can only remember twelve words that start with L (she does much better with D). Then, of course, as in most contemporary plays, a howling Flasher is chewed out by a new mother who is disappointed in the Village and her husband, who wants to have sex with her body in her house. Anne Marie is diagnosed as “evil” by her neurologist, Roxanne ruins her chances with Dr. Gynecologist by making her sexually jealous, a Duolingo owl appears to help Aunt Colleen learn the phrase “housing is not a human right” in Español, and hey, while I have you, have you ever tried WombWork? Can I interest you in a retreat, which is the best $5000 you’ll ever spend?

I could go on—and the temptation is overwhelming because there are simply so many incredible, surprising bits and jokes and gags and swerves in this play. But Derangements is much more than its non-stop pitter patter of hilarity; it’s an incisive depiction of what it feels like to be alive right now, particularly as a woman subject to the demented cause-and-effect in a patriarchal society.

Consider these two scenarios:

A woman is assaulted because she was walking alone at night in a short dress. 

Roxanne is pregnant with a fart for nine months because she was flashed by a man in a trench coat.

The word because is working hard here, attempting to make logic where there clearly is none. So much of living now feels this way. What is happening to me and why? Everyone’s got a reason— your insurance company, the news, a friend who won’t stop posting on Threads— but the narrative never totally checks out. It’s just… ridiculous.

Anyway, I just really really hope you are eating organ meats. And please, don’t go visiting the Unaffiliated Woman for husband poison. She’s super, super armed.