A Flaming Creature
Don Shewey and Harry Kondoleon met in New York City in the early 80s, shortly after Kondoleon premiered his early play ‘Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise’. Here, Shewey speaks to director Alastair Curtis about their friendship and the origins of ‘Christmas on Mars’.
Article published by The AIDS Plays Project in December 2023.
Above: Harry Kondoleon, photographer unknown.
Could we start by discussing your relationship with Harry Kondoleon?
I was a theatre editor and critic in New York City when we met in the early 80s. I saw Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise in 1981 and wrote a review about it. He then invited me to one of his plays at Yale, where he was studying at the time. It was called Rococo, a two-act play that is not done very often now, but that production starred none other than Frances McDormand. Shortly after, in 1983, there was a festival of his short plays at John Jay College, New York. I interviewed him for The Village Voice, in a piece called Ferocious Fairytales. After that we got to know each other and stayed friends until he died.
How would you characterise his writing style?
He was a comic writer primarily, with a touch of surrealism and zaniness. When I wrote about him, I put him in the lineage of Joe Orton, John Guare and Christopher Durang, who took naturalistic forms into the stratosphere. Harry was also a man of letters, a culture vulture from a very early age. He read a lot and loved film. He was a painter and poet. He pulled all of that into his work, which could be original and florid. From the beginning, when he still was an undergraduate, he won playwriting awards every year in school. Right off the bat, his voice was so singular, poetic — and queer, too. He was a little shy about being openly gay. At some point he gave that up.
What films and literature was Kondoleon inspired by?
He loved European art films, Antonioni and Godard especially. He loved following the Andy Warhol crowd and Patti Smith. He enjoyed poetry by Anne Sexton and particularly Sylvia Plath. He once said: ‘William Shakespeare—that’s my husband in heaven.’ I said, ‘who’s your husband in hell?’ He said, ‘Oh there’s so many.’ He could be very funny.
He had a real gift for one-liners. One of my favourites in this play is when Ingrid calls Audrey a ‘witch on an iceberg’. It sounds as if he was just as funny in life.
He was such a character. No one who met him could ever forget him. It’s like how people talk about Oscar Wilde. He was a dandy, always impeccably dressed with some quirky accessory. Handsome too, with very expressive eyes. A flaming creature.
Tell me about some of his quirks.
Well, he had a very specific way of speaking. His voice was instantly recognisable. People would have fun imitating him. He had no compunction about being queer in any setting.
There’s a beautiful photograph of him in drag as ‘Coco’.
She was a trip! Those pictures were done by his friend Tom Holdorf, sadly no longer with us. Coco was a character Harry created for the shoot. He loved being photographed and photographers loved to photograph him because he was so photogenic.
I actually discovered Harry Kondoleon through Peter Hujar’s portrait of him.
That’s a beautiful portrait.
It’s absolutely gorgeous, isn’t it?
I don’t know how it happened but I do know he was pleased to be shot by Peter Hujar, whom he admired. He’s looking at himself in a hand mirror. That’s very much Harry.
Were there any other playwrights whose work he enjoyed?
Harry could be competitive. There weren’t many peers he loved, with the exception of Maria Irene Fornés. We first met each other in the audience of Torch Song Trilogy and I know he appreciated that play. He also respected John Guare, who was his teacher.
Do you have any memories of ‘Christmas on Mars’ and its premiere in 1983?
It was a fantastic production, starring many people who went onto big things. Michael O’Keefe, who played Bruno, was a film actor best known for The Great Santini; he’s gone on to star in numerous TV shows and films. Harriet Harris, who played Audrey, has become a successful character actor. Joe Pichette, who played Nissim - alas, no longer with us - worked a lot in Ridiculous Theatre with John Vaccaro at La Mama. He was a terrific actor! Christmas on Mars was also Harry’s introduction to Playwrights Horizons, a theatre that embraced him and did the best production he ever had, of Anteroom in 1985.
Did you ever talk about the play’s conception?
His best friend was Stephen Soba, who is now his literary executor. When I told him you were doing this, he said: ‘you can tell him that I remember proudly that I requested Harry write a gay character.’ So, Harry came up with Nissim. In the second production of Christmas on Mars, in San Diego or Washington, I remember Harry told me that when he went to one of the last rehearsals, the actor playing Nissim was playing him too camp. Harry said: “No, no, cut all that shit out. He’s a real person.” The next rehearsal, all that was gone. Harry was very particular about the way his plays were performed.
Do you have a favourite play?
One of the earliest plays I saw by him was called The Brides. It’s a text that has no set number of characters, so every production is completely different. It can be done with three women, or it can be done with five characters. Sometimes there is a male character; sometimes there is not. I love that play. It’s a beautiful poem for the stage.
I saw in ‘Last Address’, a film by Ira Sachs, that Harry was living on Manhattan’s West Side when he died. Could you talk to me more about Harry’s relationship with New York over the years?
Well, he grew up in Queens, a very prosaic part of New York City. His family were very Greek, to the extent his father’s name was Sophocles and his mother’s name was Athena! His family were very connected to their Greek heritage, including speaking Greek at home. Harry has an older sister, Christine, and they have the exact same birthday. They were so smart and arty, more than their parents, who were very square: his father was an accountant and his mother a social worker. Christine, in particular, was a huge ally. She loved him deeply. She was an art historian and curator, now retired.
Harry went to Hamilton College for undergraduate, then moved to New Haven to go to Yale. A few years later he moved back to New York City, to 10th Street in East Village, which was very funky at the time. The neighbourhood was a little sketchy, lots of drugs on the street and so forth. But Harry liked going to all the galleries, gay bars and performance art spaces that were opening there, such as the Pyramid and Club 57.
He also had a patron named Stephen Graham, whose family owned The Washington Post. Stephen and his wife loved Harry and his plays and they let him move into one of their lofts in Soho shortly after he was diagnosed with AIDS in the 1990s. It was huge, old-fashioned, and big enough that he could literally ride a bicycle around it. Harry’s bedroom was like a little house in the middle of it! That’s where he wrote Diary of a Lost Boy and Saved or Destroyed, his final play. But going up and down in that building - it was a freight elevator situation - proved hard as he was getting frailer and sicker, so he eventually moved to London Terrace. It wasn’t exactly fancy, but it was a nice apartment building in Chelsea where Susan Sontag and Annie Leibowitz had adjacent apartments. That was where Harry was living when he died.
Sontag, Leibowitz, Pyramid, Club 57. He was at the centre of downtown scene, then. Harry seems always to have been in the right place at the right time!
Well, he was blessed in some ways and cursed in others. He had a lot of people on his side, but he also knew how to piss people off and make enemies.
Enemies? Tell me more.
One of the regrettable things is that Harry never found one director he connected with. Christopher Durang had Jerry Zaks and, later, Nicholas Martin. Sam Shepard had Robert Woodruff. Harry never had one director. He could be a little difficult to work with. The lead actor of Zero Positive, a play he wrote in 1989, was well-known, but Harry thought he was wrong for the part and fired him during the show’s previews. The director, an actor and friend of theirs, also quit. It was turmoil. But I remember Harry saying afterwards, with no regrets: “playwrights have a lot of rights, and I exercised mine.”
I’ll make sure to use that line in future! You mention he was writing a couple of novels in the last years of his life. I know about ‘Diary of a Lost Boy’, which was published in 1994 a couple of months before Harry died. Were there others?
He wrote another beautiful novel called Human Nature, which never got published. It’s a dreamy story about a woman who goes to a retreat centre for people with various kinds of sicknesses, spiritual as well as physical. There is a page missing which is a problem, but I would love to have it published. Who knows if that will ever happen?
If anyone is coming to Harry Kondoleon’s work for the first time, and I think many in our audience will be, what should they try and read next?
I’d recommend Self-Torture and Strenuous Exercise, his book of selected plays. That contains his brilliantly funny one-act play Self-Torture and Strenuous Exercise, as well as Anteroom. A favourite play of mine is Play Yourself, which was only performed posthumously and is available in an acting edition. It’s about a former Hollywood starlet named Jean, loosely based on Louise Brooks, who has long-retired from show business when an obsessed fan shows up on her doorstep. It’s very Bergman-like and a fantastic role for an ageing actress. Estelle Parsons did a reading once, and Janice Rule starred in a workshop version on the West Coast. It deserves to be much better-known.
With all your experience seeing these plays firsthand and knowing Harry as closely as you did, is there any advice you would give to our performers?
Don’t push the laughs. Play it very straight-faced. The humour will come. As with Joe Orton, you can do the characters over-broadly but they are not as fun that way. Remember these are real people. Play them as naturalistically as you would a Eugene O’Neil character. Harry also felt a kinship with the plays of Tennessee Williams. His characters can be outlandish but inside they are real people. So, finding the essence of the person is key. They are not farcical or satirical. Harry saw them as fairytales.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
For the actor playing Nissim, I will say this: the character is really a portrait of Harry. Like Nissim, Harry loved babies. He was obsessed by them. In his heart of hearts, he would have loved to be a father. His sister Christine had a son named Lucas, who is a grown man now, and Harry loved him to death. You know, Harry was a big pop music fan - I used to make mixtapes for him - and his favourite song was the B52s’ ‘Song for a Future Generation’ because of the line ‘let’s meet and a have a baby now’. He loved that.