A Note on ‘Christmas on Mars’
By Stephen Soba
Article published by The AIDS Plays Project in December 2024
Above: Stephen Soba with Harry Kondoleon. Courtesy Don Shewey.
“I’ve written a letter to your mother.”
Bruno’s remark to his girlfriend, Audrey, at once offhand and outrageous, launches Christmas on Mars. Harry doesn’t wait to introduce an Ibsen-esque surprise letter in Act Two; instead he presses the detonator in the opening line.
I still find this line hilarious. In the early 1980s, when he wrote Christmas on Mars, Harry lived in a small walkup in a dilapidated building on 10th Street in New York’s East Village. Whenever he finished writing a play, he’d phone me to come over. He’d sit across from me at his Formicatopped kitchen table scrutinizing my face as I read it. Every reaction was interrogated – “Why did you laugh? What was funny?”
There’s much I treasure about this play. It contains Harry’s love of Christmas, his favorite holiday until nearly the end, when looming death turned Christmas into a mockery; his passion for babies, pure creatures with unsullied souls; and of course the character of Nissim. I had asked Harry to write a gay character. We were both gay men in our 20s and I wanted his plays to be gayer. So he made Nissim, among my favorite of his characters.
“Where is the beauty of the soul?” Nissim wonders. “I ask the question and get ridiculed. “This century,” he concludes, “the beauty of the soul has diminished like a shrunken head.”
I think Nissim’s question lies at the core of everything Harry wrote, every collage and drawing and lithograph he made, every outfit he wore, every meal he prepared, every conversation he had. (His conversation! Every day of the past thirty years since his death, I’ve missed hearing his teasing voice on the phone. He was excruciatingly funny, able to find the exquisite and the absurd in everything.) Nissim is a character so close to Harry — as tormented and funny as he was, as eager to find love, to be loved for the deepest part of himself. In Nissim you can hear the poets Harry loved best: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson. At one point Nissim says, “I swallow transgression now like water. I wake up in the morning and I feel like a contusion…” A parody of Plath, yes, but also an homage.
A poisoned soufflé — Harry’s comic timing lifts the play off the ground and keeps it afloat while he turns every line inside out to expose the dark germ of cruelty, viciousness, fear, injustice, and lovelessness at the heart of human suffering. In his plays, Lucille Ball meets Rainer Maria Rilke. His characters are always waiting to hear the angels or the voice of God.
Harry didn’t borrow only from the greatest poets. Ingrid’s line “Look at me. Look at my face” is from The Supremes’ song “Love is Here and Now You’re Gone” — we loved Diana Ross singing those words. And he lifted names for characters from his friends’ lives: the name Audrey did come from a cat, my dear friend Stephen Harvey’s cat. (Stephen, a film scholar and MoMA curator and a lovely man, would die of AIDS in 1993, the year before Harry.)
Of the baby Audrey is carrying, Ingrid says, “I love it with all my heart and want more than anything to feel my heart again, to feel something — I want to feel joy!” In the midst of unbearable suffering, perhaps a baby can make us whole again.
Harry wrote this play before our world was annihilated by AIDS. It was 1983 and we were still in the early stages of the epidemic.
The years of decimation had begun, but it was shortly before our closest friends and community began dying in droves, before he himself tested positive and sickened. Affliction after affliction rendered him a half blind skeletal invalid in terrible, almost constant pain.
When he wrote Christmas on Mars, he had eleven more years to live. He never lost his desire to feel love and joy. He channeled all that desire into his art, and it still lives and breathes and pulsates and survives. Profound thanks to Alastair Curtis and the AIDS Plays Project, and everyone involved in this production for keeping Harry’s work alive.
Stephen Soba is Harry Kondoleon’s literary executor.