John Durang: Man of the American Stage By Lynn Matluck Brooks

Although the Durangs were Catholic, only missionaries served York’s Catholic population at this time. Since mid-century, local schools educating boys and girls of any denomination had been run by the German Reformed and Lutheran churches.²⁵ There, John Durang studied: “I was put to the German school, it being the most universal, as all the country in Pennsylvania was settlet by Germans” (4). Teachers taught in a mixture of English and German, perhaps contributing to the distinctive Pennsylvania German dialect of the region. Between this largely German-language education and his German-French home, English would become John Durang’s third and later tongue, perhaps accounting for his theatrical focus on physical rather than spoken performance. The schools also taught music, contributing to the boy’s preparation for the theater, where he later played several instruments and sang. (See fig. 2.)

John Durang remembered life in York as “dull,” aside from its popular June and November fairs, when there were

This was Durang’s earliest exposure to theatrical performance. A younger contemporary, Lewis Miller, delightfully depicted York’s life in his Sketchbook,²⁶ recording scenes that could spring directly from John Durang’s description of his York childhood: a raucous market day with tradesmen’s stalls and entertainers, a stiltwalker surrounded by onlookers, animal acts, local musicians, and holiday dancing (see fig. 3). Later in his life, John Durang would return to York to enliven it with his own performances.

The simplicity and hard work that characterized the pioneer world of his boyhood touched John Durang deeply; he wrote, “The Pennsylvania farmer stands predominant. He enjoys the sweets of industry and plenty in the bosom of his family”(5–6). Over the course of the years,