Alastair Curtis is a writer, critic and occasional revivalist of so-called “lost” plays. A couple of years ago, he became interested in the generation of playwrights from the 1970s and 80s who we lost to HIV/AIDS. Many of them, such as Charles Ludlam, Harry Kondoleon, and Robert Chesley, were acclaimed in their time, but following their untimely deaths, their works have become somewhat forgotten. This is the injustice that Alastair rails against with his AIDS Play Project. In a series of one-off rehearsed readings, the AIDS Play Project revives these brilliant lost plays, placing them back in front of the audience they deserve. 

We caught up with Alastair in the run-up to the project’s second outing, a staged reading of Harry Kondoleon’s Christmas on Mars from 1983. The play, which the critic Frank Rich in his New York Times review at the time described as “Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park as reinvented by the editors of Interview magazine,” is a barbed, quick-fire four-parter set in a bare apartment at Christmastime.

Barry Pierce: So, give me a little bit of background around the AIDS Play Project.
Alastair Curtis: It actually came from my love of Peter Hujar, mostly. I think all the writers that we’re looking at in this first season were photographed by Peter at some point. I saw a picture of Harry Kondoleon done by Peter in 1983 and I thought, what a stunner. He had this remarkable epicene face. I ended up researching him and found very little online, but I saw that he was a playwright and suddenly my background in theatre was alerted. I managed to track down various out-of-print copies of his plays and I was sort of stunned by the idiosyncrasy of his work, how bizarre and eccentric it is, but also how pioneering it was. 

As I went on with the research, I started to discover certain, I don’t know, what I see as historical injustices. Harry won an Obie for Most Promising Playwright in 1983 for Christmas on Mars, which he won alongside David Mamet, who is obviously much more well-known now. I thought, what a shame that a writer who was ceaselessly inventive and pioneering in terms of his attitude towards queerness has not really entered the mainstream in the same way. He was a writer who had works premiering at Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons and the Public Theatre, he was part of that generation of New York playwrights but I think, because of his premature death in 1994, he hasn’t really had the legacy that he deserves.

But for the past two years I’ve been researching, alongside my collaborators Max Allen and Helen Noir, and we’ve put together a list about 30 writers who were writing during the 1970s through to the 1990s whose lives were cut short by HIV/AIDS and, as a result, their work has been marginalised and almost forgotten by subsequent generations.

BP: Tell us about Harry Kondoleon and Christmas on Mars, what is it about the play that you felt you had to stage it?
AC: Well, I’ve read nearly all of Harry’s works that are in print, and some that are not. Christmas on Mars premiered in 1983 at Playwrights Horizons in New York and it is a work that I think captures all of the particular joys of Harry’s writing. It’s quite a conventional comedy to start with, it’s about infidelity and adultery and this unconventional foursome living in an apartment in New York in the 80s, but Harry pushes it further with his bizarre, eccentric sense of humour. 

So, in one particularly brilliant bit of the play, we have Audrey and her estranged mother Ingrid. Throughout the play, Ingrid is desperate for her daughter to forgive her for various parental neglects throughout her life but she simply cannot find a way of getting through to her daughter, who is very adamant that she will not forgive her. But at the end of the play, Ingrid says what if I lay down on the floor and let you walk across my back? Would you forgive me then? And Audrey says yes, I would actually. So Ingrid lays down and, in pink slippers, Audrey walks over her mother for, what feels like, two minutes. 

The whole play has this antic sense of humour that I found immediately invigorating. The characters are so loquacious and they never shut up, they speak and speak and speak in these long, winding monologues that work to prevent any of the other characters from speaking. It becomes this verbal boxing ring.

“I thought, what a shame that a writer who was ceaselessly inventive and pioneering in terms of his attitude towards queerness has not really entered the mainstream…”

BP: What was the reaction to Christmas on Mars when it premiered?
AC: It was one of Harry’s earlier plays and while it was well-received, it wasn’t hailed as as much of a success as his later plays would be. I think it’s certainly one of his strongest. Harry himself graduated from Yale and came to New York in 1981. He was a prolific writer, he produced about three or four plays in the space of three years. Christmas on Mars feels like it speaks to the moment quite perfectly. But Harry’s later plays did have more acclaim. 

Zero Positive from 1988 was one of his most well-received plays and is about the communal fear and grief that surrounded the AIDS crisis at the time. It’s about these characters who find out that they are zero positive for a disease that resembles HIV/AIDS. Arguably in his later plays his style crystallises and becomes more clear to us and Zero Positive in particular has been heralded as a classic of AIDS theatre, but it hasn’t been staged for many, many years.

He also actually wrote a hugely well-received novel, Diary of a Lost Boy, that is very much a lost classic of gay literature that could rank alongside anything by Hervé Guibert or Gary Indiana. It follows this young man who is given two years to live because he is slowly dying of HIV/AIDS and he spends the years trying to save the marriage of his two best friends, Bill and Susan. There are just so many bitchy dinner parties and wonderful lines.

BP: The AIDS Play Project reminds me of when Fran Lebowitz talks about New York in the 80s and she speaks about all these great things happening in the theatres, in the opera houses, all these ballets and plays and musicals, and then when AIDS happened, we didn’t just lose the creatives behind all these works, but we lost the audience too. And that has been equally as detrimental to the legacies of these works.
AC: When I was preparing to tackle Harry’s work I met Don Shewey, who was one of his early reviewers and a critic of his work, and it was humbling and so exciting to hear him talk about how audiences first received Harry’s work and, hell, the gossip that surrounded his works and the performers. The version of history that we have of these plays is on an index in the New York Public Library, but the actual informal archive, the oral histories remembering these works, has been obscured. That connection I had with Don was hugely influential in deciding to do Christmas on Mars and he’s given us a two-hour interview that he recorded with Harry in 1982 that we’re going to play bits of before the show. It’s the only recording we have of Harry’s voice and it’s so amazing to hear him laugh and giggle about the show. At one point, he says making an audience laugh is like giving them flowers, and I thought that was so beautiful. 

BP: You’ve already staged one play, Charles Ludlam’s Camille, I’m wondering what the audience you had for that was like?
AC: I think nobody in the audience was a traditional theatre-goer, which was incredibly exciting, they were club-goers, they were artists, people in that scene. We had young people, we had Lavinia Co-Op herself, who knew Ludlam very well and was in the audience for many of his original productions. It was really two things: for one section of the audience it was a fundamental and exciting encounter with a part of our history and it was witty and filthy and glorious, and for another section it was a way of measuring time, between the original production and our production, and seeing how things have changed in that time. 

The AIDS Play Project is an ongoing collaboration with London Performance Studios.

Christmas on Mars by Harry Kondoleon will be performed on December 9th. For more details on The AIDS Plays Project and its upcoming shows, please visit their website.