PUT ON A HAPPY FACE: Kidd channels Sedaris’s elfin ways in The Santaland Diaries. |
The humor of David Sedaris is infectious because it comes out so naturally, like a hacking cough that he’s worried about but is trying to make light of. On the occasion of a holiday season that tradition and shared traumas has kept similarly ironic, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre is staging two plays based on his stories, The Santaland Diaries & Season’s Greetings (through December 24).The former is based on his experiences for two seasons (compressed here to one) as a Santa elf at Macy’s in New York City. The ordeal and the resulting story launched Sedaris’s career in 1992 after excerpts he read on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition became the most requested broadcast in the history of NPR. His wit has since become a staple on This American Life, and collections of his stories of self-deprecating embarrassments, such as Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, are best sellers. The two plays were adapted in 1998 by New York-based director Joe Mantello.
The monologues are being brought to vivid and hilarious life at the Gamm by Steve Kidd and Casey Seymour Kim, directed by Chris Byrnes and Wendy Overly, respectively. Kidd has an impish smile, so he’s one step farther ahead than Sedaris was when he hit the Big Apple jobless and had to work up a reluctant elfin smirk for the Macy’s gig. Three weeks in town, he says he was “$20 away from walking dogs.” We hear about a 10-page application form and a drug test that he somehow passes even though his urine “had roaches and stems floating in it.” We fear for the poor, sensitive lad. If the cutesy costume or the motivational cheers don’t get him, he might be done in by having to remember not to ask a kid who is missing, say, a nose, what he wants for Christmas. Who knew that being an elf was so fraught with social peril?
As the big day approaches and the lines get longer and less ruly, with parents tossing soiled diapers into the cellulose foliage and fistfights breaking out between mothers, Kidd shows Sedaris coping in strained serenity. He also conveys a truly magical moment, in which one of the Santas is actually a wise and decent human being, making children feel wonderful about themselves and coaxing real-live loving regard from their parents.
Season’s Greetings is a distinctly different, comically darker tale, a short story rather than a memoir vignette. We are being addressed by a housewife in a Midwestern suburb, Jocelyn Dunbar, chirpy and intense to the point of manic hysteria. Casey Seymour Kim starts out playing her with a sort of North-Northwest Norwegian accent out of Fargo that she drops and sometimes picks up again, as though it’s just another of Jocelyn’s masks of sociability.
All but shedding sparks, the woman is addressing us like friends she has convened in her prim living room. (The colorful beribboned boxes of Santaland have been replaced with off-white.) We are here to hear her account — her version — of the Dunbars’ recent difficulties and “terrible loss,” that last detail saved for a black humor payoff.
