MITCHELL LICHTENSTEIN

MAY 20, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 15

ENTERTAINMENT

Harry Kondoleon: Laughing at the horror we face

by Barry Daniels

Harry Kondoleon, one of our most gifted playwrights, died of AIDS complications on March 16, 1994, at the age of 39. His last play, Saved or Destroyed, will be given its world premiere in Cleveland by the Working Theatre. The production will be directed by Walter Grodzick. It will be presented at the Spaces Gallery in conjunction

Harry Kondoleon

with the exhibition "Art and AIDS."

Kondoleon was the author of more than twenty plays, two novels and a book of poems. He received an Obie award for most promising playwright in 1983, a few weeks before his first major success, Christmas on Mars, opened in New

York. Over the next ten years his plays were produced regularly by the most important OffBroadway theaters:

Linda Her and The Fairy Garden in 1984, Anteroom in 1985, Zero Positive in 1988, Love

hilarious and terribly frightening and painful at the same time. He blends those two

things to the point that you can't really separate them. I don't think anyone else does it as well as he does."

At one point in our discussion, trying to characterize Kondoleon's plays, we began to rattle off themes or motifs that recur throughout his work: dysfunctional families, child abuse, abuse in general, violence, banality, mediocrity, hysteria and recrimination. In an early profile, Don Shewey aptly described the style of the plays as like "a cartoon in which stick figures bleed real blood." In the Village Voice obituary critic Michael Feingold said, "His scripts track through the traumas of our time in errant, madcap ways, high comedies deconstructed by horror and despair. In them the desperate rich, the resentful poor, and the beleaguered middle class bang into one another like the noisy, bright-colored puppets in a Punch and Judy show."

Grodzick first met Kondoleon in 1990 when the playwright came to Cleveland to see Grodzick's production of Christmas on Mars at the Cleveland Public Theatre. In one of his last encounters with Kondoleon, Grodzick recalls that the playwright asked, "In meeting me, am I like my plays?” “And the only response I had," Grodzick noted, "was that he was exactly like his plays. The way he looked in the face with humor at everything that was happening around him."

Although Kondoleon would not have liked to be categorized as a writer of gay

HANK SKLADANOWSKI

Anil Bardwaj and Chris Sanner in the Working Theatre's production of Saved or Destroyed.

who might be offended by this. (Reality has caught up with Kondoleon, as Fox Broadcasting Company debates whether or not to delete a scene of men kissing from a Melrose Place episode, scheduled to be aired this month.)

John: I must grant you, you're a consummate manhater.

Vera: I'm a woman-hater, too, make no mistake about it. In this way I am most like God, with God's total lack of sympathy for all men and women.

Diatribe in 1990, The Houseguests, which received an Obie as best play, in 1993.

Director Grodzick and I met in an Ohio City cafe to discuss Kondoleon a few days after I had attended a rehearsal of Saved or Destroyed. I told him how much I admire Kondoleon's writing. His talent was unique, but except for Christmas on Mars, his work never achieved the kind of national attention given to his contemporaries. Grodzick replied, "I think Kondoleon is a major playwright whose importance will not be recognized for quite some time. As with Pinter, Orton, and Beckett, you must enter his world to perform him; he doesn't come to you." Grodzick continued, "The other thing I really love about his work is that more than any other American playwright, he captures what it was like to be alive in Urban America now. The plays are so howlingly

Beginning with Zero Positive (which the Working Theatre produced in 1992), Kondoleon's work is filled with metaphors for AIDS. His comic vision becomes darker, and death lurks in the shadows. Images of the brutality and arbitrariness of God are common. His humor is savage and vehement. But for all the anger manifest in his late work, Grodzick reminded me that "In all his work what sustains one spiritually is love. Love is something he never really dismisses. He believes in it as an answer."

-The Houseguests

plays, his work is a brilliant expression of a gay sensibility. Grodzick affirmed that, "Only a gay man could have written these plays. The humor is so brutal. Nothing is sacred. Everything is held up for inspection or as a possible source of delight. There is a

campiness in his writing as well

as an exuberance theatricality." Gay characters are present in most of his plays, and they often seem to be extensions of the

author. These gay characters are never closeted, nor does

the abuse and horror we witness. Grodzick noted the play "is an AIDS metaphor for people who have seen so many friends die, who have had so much taken away, and about their own sense of loss. It is about what sustains them and what helps them endure beyond AIDS. And it is also about anyone who faces havoc or craziness in their lives."

In the last few years of his all-too-brief life, Kondoleon wrote in a kind of white heat. In the despair and anger associated

with his illness, and in the constant and very real presence of death, he seemed to know that his work would survive and that, in it, his spirit would live. The epigraph to the novel he published shortly before his death can serve as his epitaph: "Please do not feel sorry for me. I go to someplace thrilling."

A collection of Kondoleon's plays, Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise was pub-

All my friends have died. Suddenly and slowly. I like to think they are only "temporarily removed," like pictures at an exhibition. But I'm so used to talking to them on the telephone, I wake up at two a.m. and start dialing.

Kondoleon use the devices many of his contemporaries employ to make gay characters "acceptable" to a mainstream audience. In one of his last plays, Half Off, he makes a kiss between two men the climax of the plot, thumbing his nose at an audience

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Saved or Destroyed is about six actors performing (or rehearsing) a play. Both actors and characters are represented and life and role blend in the play's intricate and fragmented structure. The language is razor sharp and succeeds in making us laugh at

-Half Off

lished in 1991 by the Theatre Communications Group and is still in print. His novel Diary of a Lost Boy was published in January by Knopf.

Saved and Destroyed will be performed by the Work-

ing Theatre at the Spaces Gallery, May 27June 17, Thursday-Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 3 pm. Tickets are $10 and $7.50 (students and seniors). Seating is very limited. Reservations should be made as early as possible. Call 696-9600.

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