It has been the ambitious dream of many an author throughout history to begin a piece of writing with a sentence—"Call me Ishmael," "For a long time I used to go to bed early"—so irresistible that his readers couldn't fail to proceed to the next sentence and then to the next and the next, pitching headlong as far into the piece as the author's literary ingenuity was able to entice them. This dream came true last week for Christopher Durang, at the opening of his delightful little farce "Beyond Therapy" …: the audience laughed at the very first line of the play, then at the second, and then at the third; I can bear witness to the fact that I wasn't alone in continuing to laugh with something like the regularity of a metronome through most of the rest of the play. Mr. Durang's earlier dramatic works...