Hired to be in his co-authored play, the Dostoevesky send-up The Idiots Karamazov, Durang was also cast in this serious Dostoevesky adaptation, directed by the famous Polish film/stage director Andrej Wajda.

Durang’s most notable line as the Student was “I think God should be shot!” Wajda understood English but didn’t speak it, and in the first week told Durang through an interpreter to just “keep talking throughout the scene.” “Even when I don’t have lines?” Durang asked, confused. The director nodded. So Durang ad-libbed many surly retorts in rehearsal which then got kept for performance. Quite a “green light” to get from the director.

The leading roles in The Possessed, by the way, were played by Christopher Lloyd (a distinguished leading man before his Taxi days), Meryl Streep (still a student, and playing a beautiful aristocrat), Jerome Dempsey, Norma Brustein, the aforementioned Alvin Epstein, and the Polish film actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, who gave an especially remarkable performance.