Martian Holiday

Christmas on Mars
Written by Harry Kondoleon. Directed by Reid Davis. Produced by the Shotgun Players. Starring Beth Donohue, Patrick Dooley, Andrew Hurteau, and Marin Van Young. At La Val's Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid Ave., Berkeley, through Aug. 15. Call (510) 655-0813.

Harry Kondoleon wrote 17 plays and two novels before dying of AIDS in 1994, at the age of 39, and his writing never lost a sense of being obsessive, gay, and young: Sex goes scrambling through all his work like an uncontrollable dog.

Christmas on Mars opens with a straight couple named Audrey and Bruno admiring a small Manhattan apartment -- they seem almost too straight, and you wonder why they're acting so normal -- then lists dangerously close to catastrophe when Bruno's gay roommate, Nissim, comes in. He's a trembling, wild-haired, acne-spotted airline steward, freshly fired from his job, who still has on his brass-button uniform and pulls around a wheeled carry-on. He's pissed at Bruno for leaving him alone, and offers proof to Audrey that her boyfriend (and father of her fetal child) is gay. Audrey doesn't care. Nissim explodes into a rant about "the beauty of the soul" and then collapses, midsentence, on the floor.

Christmas on Mars moves forward just like that -- in jerks, using rapid-fire surprises to build steam. Its marvelous manic energy is driven in this show by the turbine performance of Andrew Hurteau as Nissim, who has a bitingly fey manner and a wide-eyed intensity that manages to seem both crazy and sympathetic. In spite of his terrible skin he wants to be a model, like Bruno. "Why don't you look at yourself realistically?" Bruno says.

Nissim: "Why don't you die?" His name is Hebrew for "miracles" -- "and my parents weren't even Jewish" -- but he's obviously the playwright's stand-in, the luckless gay schlimazel who stalks through most of Kondoleon's writing, especially since no one else in the play feels half as energetic or alive.

One near-exception is Audrey's mom, Ingrid. Bruno has called Ingrid for financial help, and she's on her way to see the place. Audrey hates her mom, though, and getting money from her will be a delicate task, not just because Bruno's insane ex-roommate has just revealed himself as an ex-lover and passed out on the carpet, but also because Audrey loses her balance whenever they bring up Ingrid's name. (She calls her mom by her first name.) But Ingrid seems to be a stable, mature woman, at first, and Beth Donohue plays her with careful shading -- delicate and subtly felt. She's gentler than Nissim, but comes off as detailed and full.

The newlyweds don't. Audrey appears to be a cautious, inwardly frantic young woman until her mom shows up; then she turns into a banshee. Marin Van Young strains to make Audrey credible, but her rancor toward Ingrid seems exaggerated and fake. Van Young improves in Act 2, as a heavy overdue mother, brimming with an emotionality, a silent hatred for Bruno, and a ferocious craving for mixed nuts that all give the actress something to work with. Patrick Dooley plays Bruno as a smirking and eerily sentimental straight guy -- hugging Audrey, giving sappy speeches about their child -- but he doesn't do it with enough distance, and the first part of his performance feels not just straight but actually stiff.

Dooley improves later, when Bruno explodes at Nissim: For most of the play, Nissim has been teasing and torturing Bruno by revealing dirty secrets and making hilarious demands. Bruno at last bites back, and mockingly tries to rape Nissim in the unborn baby's crib. Dooley pulls off this scene with a smooth balance of outrage and control.

I like Christmas on Mars for the way it mixes caricature and real life; Kondoleon belonged to the vast modern experiment of trying to find a middle path between those two extremes. Some older writers found one (Shaw, Beckett, Grass), but there seems to be plenty of room in contemporary writing for exploration, since no young writer I've read or watched has managed the same effects. Wild satire doesn't need to sacrifice warmth, humanity, or seriousness any more than a serious purpose needs to sacrifice humor; but Kondoleon falls apart on the humanity side, just like Joe Orton. Neither playwright can get out of his outrageous situations with anything besides a junk ending. Donohue has turned Ingrid into a full character, and with more attention to detail Hurteau might have made Nissim complex -- his performance falls into a stiff-and-edgy rut -- but I'm not sure what anyone could do with Audrey and Bruno. They're written like Tom Tomorrow cartoons, with a wink at the audience ("We all know what normal people are like"), and the play's finale has to rely on stock happy-end techniques.

But Reid Davis' direction keeps the surprises coming at a comfortable clip, and Michael Frassinelli's set helps out with its hot-pink walls and crooked window frames. Mars is a much more effective showcase for an underproduced playwright than the Shotgun Players' last newish-playwright effort, Benjie Aerenson's Possum Play, simply because the cast seems to be having a much better time. Kondoleon's tragedy was that he died before he matured, and before breaking into national fame, leaving behind a large body of work that gets far too little attention. Why isn't he played more often in the Bay Area? His New York attitude -- gay sans self-pity, or maybe gay with a cannon aimed at self-pity -- works as a salutary slap in the face.