The play's title, its author agrees, may suggest something "Santa Claus Is Coming Out" is not. "You might dismiss the show based on the title as a silly farce without a lot of depth," said playwright Jeffrey Solomon, who also portrays 20 characters in the solo show. "Originally the play had a subtitle, "Or How the Gay Agenda Came Down My Chimney," which captures some of the subversive leanings of the play."
Solomon first performed "Santa Claus Is Coming Out" in 2001, and he tries to revive it annually in different cities. He'll be making his San Francisco debut on Dec. 19 when he begins a six-performance run at the Eureka Theatre, performing Santa Claus in repertory with Combined Artform's annual production of the David Sedaris comedy "Santaland Diaries."
"Santa Claus Is Coming Out" is presented in the docudrama style of an Anna Deavere Smith play, in this case with a tongue-in-cheek program note informing theatergoers that all of the text came from Solomon's interviews with the key players in what became known as "Santa-gate." Through the course of the play, Solomon adopts the personae of his supposed interview subjects, from age 7 to 87, including a monologue from Rudolph, who has left Santa's team to start his own rent-a-reindeer enterprise.
"The emotional core of the story is about this little boy, Gary, whose parents love him but don't really get him," Solomon said in a Thanksgiving Day interview from his father's house in Connecticut. "When he asks Santa Claus for a gender-atypical toy, Santa is afraid to say yes because he's a closeted gay man and just gives Gary a truck instead." But at the North Pole, the issue begins to snowball as Santa is nudged out of the closet by Gary's heartfelt letters, while Mrs. Claus is revealed to be a second-tier character actress hired by Coca-Cola, and the religious right goes into high dudgeon as they see it all as a gay plot to indoctrinate children.
In fact, fiction became fact when one performance of a 2009 off-Broadway run of "Santa Claus Is Coming Out" was a fundraiser for GLSEN, the national organization that promotes gay-straight alliances in schools. While the play is intended for adults, and the audience at the performance in question was adult, it set off alarm bells at the anti-gay watchdog group Focus on the Family. Candi Cushman, billed as the group's education analyst, tore into Santa Claus.
Four years later, Solomon can still recite the blogged attack. "The headline was 'Gay fundraiser sexualizes Santa Claus,' and the first line of the post said, 'GLSEN, which pretends it wants to protect kids, has chosen to use a fundraising tool that perverts the innocence of Christmas.' And then they went on to say about me, 'Clearly homosexual activist Jeffrey Solomon has no qualms about using shock tactics to expose children to homosexuality.' It felt like a page taken right from my play."
In fact, a fictional anti-gay activist who offers testimony as part of the mock-umentary came from undercover interviews Solomon conducted when an Orange County school moved to ban a gay-straight alliance. But what really set Solomon on the road to create Santa Claus was his anger at Measure 9, which appeared on Oregon's ballot in the 1990s. It declared homosexuality to be "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse," and insisted that public schools promote that position.
The measure was defeated, but Solomon sees its attitudes persisting. "The bigots' last refuge is saying that we are doing all this for the children, and it's tragic," he said. "The play is from the point of view of a kid who really needs some adult to be there for him or he will live a life of pain and shame. When I was coming up as a kid, there was little discussion of these issues, and if there were any, they were negative. So I created in Santa Claus the hero I needed as a kid."
During most of the year, Solomon serves as founding artistic director of Houses on the Moon Theatre Company, which creates issue-oriented plays for both general audiences and as teaching tools at schools, universities, and social agencies. He lives in Queens with his husband and their adopted son, and that his husband is a physician figures into "mother/SON," his solo drama about coming out to his mother. "My mother really lived up to the stereotype of a Jewish mother with her level of excitement in having a doctor join the family," he said. "I think it really helped on her journey to accepting me as a gay man."
As a Jewish kid, Solomon had a Santa Claus obsession that his parents didn't discourage. "One year my father actually hired a guy dressed as Santa to come to our door. I was 4, and I remember it as being total magic. But then I looked out the window and saw him leaving in a VW bug."
Ticket info on "Santa Claus Is Coming Out" is available at combinedartform.com