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Sedaris is burning
The Santaland author explains why he hates the play that helped make him.
If David Sedaris had one Christmas wish this holiday season, it might be making a silent night out of Santaland Diaries, the popular stage version of his career-making story. “I never should have agreed to it,” he lamented in an interview earlier this year, regretting his decision to license the rights to the production that has become a Christmas tradition in the last decade. “When they wanted to do the play in New York, I said it wouldn’t work [on stage],” he continues, offering his unwavering critique years later.
But there are some who do believe, including the scores of loyal fans who have made the antiholiday anthem chronicling Sedaris’s excruciating employment as an elf in Macy’s Santaland a crux of American theater, including in Chicago, where it’s been performed by the likes of David Cromer and Lance Baker (at the now-defunct Roadworks Theatre Company) and Joe Foust and Mitchell Fain in Theater Wit’s perennial version, which runs this year at Theatre Building Chicago.
With its roots as a comic radio essay, “Santaland Diaries” was the story that single-handedly put Sedaris on the national radar when he debuted himself and the monologue in a live reading on NPR’s Morning Edition on December 23, 1992.
Soon after, it became the cornerstone of Sedaris’s early essay collection Barrel Fever (Back Bay Books, $14.99), and later, it warranted a collection of seasonal stories called Holidays on Ice (reissued in October by Little Brown and Company with an additional six stories, $18.99).
But it is the 1996 theatrical production that began in New York (at the hand of ubiquitous Wicked director Joe Mantello) that is responsible for its longevity. For the last decade, Santaland has been regifted on enough American stages to become the second-most-performed holiday show in the nation. In fact, this cherished Dickens alternative was the No. 2 professionally produced play in America last year, after John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. American Theatre magazine editor-in-chief James O’Quinn, who notes his publication’s annual survey of professional theaters doesn’t take Shakespeare or Scrooge into account in its yearly tally, counts at least 14 nonprofit theaters in his guild that will stage the play in 2008. O’Quinn attributes Santaland’s popularity to oversaturation of the holiday standard. “People do get pretty tired of Christmas Carol, and Santaland is a really funny story” he says.
Sedaris isn’t particularly fond of having the holiday story or the play as his main claim to fame. As any writer who critiques his own early work will understand, for Sedaris the problem lies more with the story of Santaland itself. “I don’t like the story to begin with,” he says. “It doesn’t do a thing for me.”
Jeremy Wechsler, artistic director of Theater Wit and Santaland’s director, notes that Sedaris’s unfavorable opinion may also reflect the story’s limiting effects at the beginning of his career: “Sedaris worked really hard at moving himself away from the brand of Santaland Diaries. The story defined him for years at the time when he was really just coming into his voice.”
And then there’s the problem of staging straight prose. “When I saw the production in New York, it felt very claustrophic,” Sedaris says of the fact that the play never leaves Santaland. “I’ve written other plays, and they have lots of characters that talk to each other. But with Santaland Diaries, it’s just like, Look, I’m standing here. I’m standing over here now. Look, I’m over here again. It just didn’t work.”
Some of Sedaris’s ambivalence about the piece that launched his career stems from his tumultuous memories of writing it. It was penned when he was just getting serious with his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, and saying goodbye to another important influence. “In the second year [of working on Santaland], my mom called and said she had cancer. And then my mom died. And I was like, Okay, time to be an elf again, even though I had just had the funeral.”
Although her death was something he would later reflect on extensively in his nonfiction, the painful experience proved too much to process and led to the kind of damaging self-medication he would later also spin into literary gold. “It was the only time I felt like my drinking was out of control,” Sedaris recalls. “Normally, I wouldn’t get so fucked up that I couldn’t function. But I went to someone’s house for Thanksgiving, complete strangers, and I got drunk and passed out on the couch, and all of a sudden I was on the vacuum cleaner. It was, like, 8:30.”
Although the sobering fact of seeing his story produced over and over again is something Sedaris himself won’t say cheers to, for his diehard fans, it’s the gift that keeps on giving year after year.
See a lot more than chestnuts being roasted when Santaland Diaries returns to the Theatre Building Chicago.
