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On November 15, an enterprising Off Broadway company called Rattlestick Theatre launched a three-week festival devoted to the work of Harry Kondoleon. The centerpiece of the festival is the world premiere of his play
Saved or Destroyed, staged by the playwright Craig Lucas, making his professional debut as a director.
Some might ask: Who is Harry Kondoleon? Others will recall that, for a decade beginning in 1983, he was practically ubiquitous in the New York theatre. He had plays produced at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Second Stage, Theater for the New City, the Public Theater, and the Circle Repertory Theatre. He won the George Oppenheimer/Newsday Playwriting Award for
Christmas on Mars in 1983, the same year that he won his first Obie Award as “most promising young playwright.” He won another Obie in 1993 for
The Houseguests. In that same span of time, he published a volume of poetry, mounted an exhibition of his paintings, directed several shows, and wrote a number of novels as well as screenplays that were never produced. This torrent of activity came to a halt in March, 1994, when he died of complications from AIDS. He had just turned 39.
Except for a handful of poems, Saved or Destroyed was the last thing Kondoleon wrote before he died. I know this because, toward the end of his life, he lost the sight in one eye, and he sometimes asked me to type his handwritten manuscripts onto his laptop for him. One of those was
Saved or Destroyed, which he wrote during a three-week residency at Yaddo, the
artists’ colony in upstate New York, in the fall of 1993. At the time he was very frail and sick, and I fully expected a minor recap of work he’d done before. Instead, he was striking out into new theatrical territory.
The story of a boy and girl on vacation with their parents overlaps with the lives of the actors putting on the show. Treading the fine line between illusion and reality, the play exists in the theatrical limbo we associate with Luigi Pirandello, as opposed to the comic playwrights to which Kondoleon has usually been likened (Joe Orton, John Guare, Christopher Durang). In
Diary of a Lost Boy, which he completed in early 1993, Kondoleon had succeeded in imagining his own death with a Buddhist sense of adventure. The novel’s heartbreaking final line is “Please do not feel sorry for me -- I go to some place thrilling!” And
Saved or Destroyed seems to pick up where that thought left off.
I asked Craig Lucas what he thought the play was about. “In my view, it’s six dead actors and one dead playwright working out all of the elements of their time on earth,” he said. “They’re getting ready to jettison the unnecessary stuff and hold onto the most elemental and important factor of having been alive in order to face a new life, prepared. I think the play is about looking at one’s life and deciding what is worth saving and what should be destroyed in order to be born again.”
Harry Kondoleon arrived on this planet in 1955 and started observing its inhabitants and their strange customs shortly thereafter. His parents were named Sophocles and Athena, though their friends in Queens called them Cliff and Tina. He shared a birthday and an artistic precociousness with his sister Christine, who was two years older and is now an art historian. He spent a year in Bali where he saw witches dance and caught typhoid fever. He sometimes joked that he majored in cutthroat competition at the Yale School of Drama, and for more than a decade he studied heartbreak and rage with New York City’s daily newspaper critics.
Traces of his life on Earth inevitably turned up in his plays: the eerie symbiosis of siblings, the ancient pleasure of putting on a show, the absurd realities of show business, the magic of delirium, and the perversity of divine forces wearing masks as mundane as potato salad. “I was too beautiful for public school. I had to be taken out,” says a character in
Rococo, which Kondoleon wrote at Yale. “The other students would bite me. They couldn’t deal with undiluted beauty. Children are irrational. I’m an artist. I dip my fingers in poison and make beautiful things.”
Harry Kondoleon, photographed by Peter Hujar
Yet much that goes on in the world of Kondoleon’s artwork escapes any explanation biography has to offer. His sneaky way, for instance, of writing comedies that begin in recognizable living rooms and then spiral imperceptibly into poetry -- where did it come from? That, like the love his characters urgently seek, is a mystery that remains intact.
I first met Kondoleon in 1982 when I interviewed him for a newspaper article, and before long we became close friends. What endeared him to me was that he was a true original. I’ve never known anyone else who lived so relentlessly in the world of the imagination. His eye transformed everything it looked at, filling it with bright colors and feverish emotions or draining it of everything but the elegant geometry of ennui. He could write with incredible sophistication about sex and love and deviousness and suffering, sparing none of the details of what he called “the incurable hunger, the rampant churning, the pitiful diet of small kisses, handshakes, and telephone calls.” He wrote out of insatiable curiosity and almost willful not-knowing. He was like an inquisitive child forever asking, “Why, Mommy? Why are they doing that?”
In his lifetime, Kondoleon never achieved the level of recognition he wanted and deserved. He never had a breakthrough hit. Although his plays were produced by prominent theaters, they weren’t always produced well. Truthfully speaking, they weren’t easy to produce well. Kondoleon was impatient with conventional dramaturgy and resistant to rewriting. He was a diehard aesthete, less interested in other plays (or wanting to emulate them) than in painting, poetry, art film, and rock music. His favorite book was
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He never wrote plays “about” anything.
Zero Positive, which some consider his masterpiece, is no more about AIDS than
The Cherry Orchard is about trees.
Producers and directors couldn’t help responding to the originality of Kondoleon’s work. And they usually knew what to do with the plays’ more traditional elements -- the family settings, the romantic squabbling, the fever-pitch comic dialogue. But they rarely knew what to do with the surrealistic images, the magical transformations (people into animals, or vice versa), or the metaphysical brooding -- “the awful rowing toward God,” in the words of Anne Sexton (a Kondoleon favorite). The results were often lumpy and overly naturalistic. The playwright longed for an avant-garde director to take his plays and do wild things with them, someone like Lee Breuer or Robert Wilson. (The Flemish director Ivo van Hove, who staged
A Streetcar Named Desire last year with no furniture except a bathtub, would have been ideal.)
The closest he got to a perfect production was the late Garland Wright’s staging of
Anteroom at Playwrights Horizons in 1985. Wright’s distaste for comic cliches, an excellent cast led by Elizabeth Wilson, and a design team that included Adrianne Lobel (sets) and Rita Ryack (costumes) helped convey the sense of a play taking place halfway between the reality of a Southampton mansion and the otherworld. I’ll never forget the scene during a masquerade party in which Ms. Wilson, as a rich matron decked out in gossamer butterfly wings, conversed with a black fashion model dressed in the striped uniform of a convict, complete with ball and chain -- complementary images of spirit trapped in a body. It was like an episode of
I Love Lucy performed inside one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes.
Although it’s cold comfort, Kondoleon’s legacy lives on in the admiration of other playwrights. First and foremost is Nicky Silver, whose darkly over-the-top comedies would be unthinkable without Kondoleon’s example. John Patrick Shanley and Richard Greenberg have also paid homage to Kondoleon in their work. Theater companies such as New York’s Drama Department and Washington’s Woolly Mammoth are hotbeds of Kondoleon enthusiasts. And a whole generation of younger playwrights -- including Chay Yew, Tom Donaghy, and Han Ong -- cite him as an influence. It’s this joy of rediscovery that Rattlestick Theatre hopes to encourage with its Kondoleon festival.
-- Don Shewey, New York Times
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