Harry Kondoleon
(1955-1994)Lust, loneliness, and the faultlines of the American family were the guiding themes of Harry Kondoleon’s poetic, often absurdist comedies. The New York-born playwright, poet and novelist scored several major successes off-Broadway, where his exuberant theatricality and wicked wit earned comparisons with Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde.
Harry Kondoleon was born in New York in 1955 and trained at Hamilton College and the Yale School of Drama, where he was a contemporary of Frances McDormand and David Henry Hwang.
Nearly all of Kondoleon’s plays begin in a naturalistic setting, such as a living-room, garden or apartment, before they transform through song, dance and ritual into mysterious and poetic dramas about loneliness, religion and sexual desire. He claimed Chekhov and Ibsen as his influences, but his esoteric plots and surreal staging also owed a lot to absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett. They are also intensely comic, combining wicked wit with bizarre non-sequiturs.
His first professional production in New York was Self-Torture and Strenuous Exercise (1981), which displayed the antic energy and verbal brilliance that would soon become his signature. “A comic soap opera about urban sophisticates, it’s one of those crazy, Joe Orton-esque plays in which the characters say and do the outrageous things most people think of but never actually say and do,” Don Shewey wrote in The New York Times. “Carl confesses to his best friend Alvin that he’s in love with another woman besides his wife, Adel; Alvin assures him that’s okay for a widower, not knowing that Adel survived her latest suicide attempt and not knowing that Carl’s paramour is his own wife, Beth.”
Christmas on Mars premiered at Playwrights Horizons in June 1983. The play is an alternative Christmas nativity consisting of an unconventional foursome - a failing actor, his talent agent girlfriend, his girlfriend’s estranged mother, and his neurotic gay ex-roommate —who can’t stand each other, but stay together out of fear, loneliness and a longing for family. It is full of Kondoleon’s customary irony and exuberant theatricality. Though it failed to score rave reviews, it won Kondoleon an Obie for ‘Most Promising Playwright’ and the play was subsequently revived in London in 2003 in a sell-out production at the Finborough Theatre.
Kondoleon in Conversation
In this rare archival recording from 1983, Harry Kondoleon discusses the inspirations behind his playwriting with Don Shewey.
Video: Lylani Devorah
After Christmas on Mars came several award-winning plays, including The Vampires, Anteroom and The Houseguests, for off-Broadway theatres including Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons, Circle Repertory and The Public Theater. Reviews often compared his work to that of Christopher Durang and Joe Orton, but in life—where he was known for his rapier wit and flamboyant fashion sense—Kondoleon more closely resembled Oscar Wilde.
The death of a friend in 1989 spurred Kondoleon to write Zero Positive, in which two close friends learn they are seropositive. Rather than address the AIDS crisis directly, Kondoleon wanted the play to “focus on the mood of communal fear and grief that the epidemic has created.” It is now regarded as his masterpiece.
His second novel Diary of a Lost Boy was published in 1994, just two months before his death. It is the wry, blackly comic story of Hector Diaz, a gay man dying of AIDS who decides to spend his remaining time with his best friends, a married couple named Susan and Bill. The last lines of this funny, bizzare but often strangely moving novel were read out during Kondoleon’s memorial service:
“My face is down in the dirt, but make no mistake, it is a beautiful place... Fear be gone! Please do not feel sorry for me — I go to some place thrilling!”
Kondoleon was 39 when he passed away in April 1994. Though his career was brief, lasting just 14 years, he wrote 18 plays, as well as two novels and a poetry collection. “I like to make people laugh”, he had once said. “It’s like giving someone a flower.”
Plays
The Brides, 1979
Rococo, 1981
Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise, 1981
Andrea Rescued, 1982
The Fairy Garden, 1982
The Côte D’Azur Triangle, 1982
Slacks and Tops, 1983
Christmas on Mars, 1983
The Vampires, 1984
Linda Her, 1984
Anteroom, 1985
The Poets’ Corner, 1988
Zero Positive, 1988
Love Diatribe, 1990
The Houseguests, 1993
Half Off, 1993
The Little Book of Professor, 1994
Saved or Destroyed, 2000
Play Yourself, 2002
Resources
harrykondoleon.com. An online archive of Kondoleon’s plays and novels, personal photographs, and memories of those who knew and worked with him.
A conversation about Kondoleon and ‘Christmas on Mars’ by Don Shewey and Alastair Curtis. November 2023.
Publications
Christmas on Mars
Polari Press, 2024
Saved or Destroyed
Dramatists Play Service, 2003
The Houseguests
Dramatists Play Service, 1993
Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise: Selected Plays
TCG, 1991
Love Diatribe
Dramatists Play Service, 1991
Linda Her and The Fairy Garden: Two Short Plays
Dramatists Play Service, 1985
The Còte D’Azur Triangle, Harry Kondoleon
Vincent FitzGerald & Co, 1985
Resources
harrykondoleon.com. An online archive of Kondoleon’s plays and novels, personal photographs, and memories of those who knew and worked with him.
A conversation about Kondoleon and ‘Christmas on Mars’ by Don Shewey and Alastair Curtis. November 2023.
Publications