Trapped in vocational hell, an elf provides chestnuts roasted on an open pit of satire.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published December 4, 2003
[Photo: American Stage]
Brandon Boyd can relate to his character in The SantaLand Diaries, David Sedaris’ angst-ridden tale of an unemployed actor playing a Macy’s elf.
Brandon Boyd can relate to the character he plays in The SantaLand Diaries, David Sedaris' one-man show about an actor with dreams of being on a soap opera who winds up as a Christmas elf at Macy's.
At 31, after 12 years of the actor's life in Nashville, Tenn., Boyd has done his share of oddball jobs between shows, not unlike that of the character he is playing.
"For a while I was doing what I called big-head gigs in Nashville," he said. "I did Power Rangers, I did Barney in a children's museum for a dinosaur exhibit. I had one little kid who kept coming up to me and punching me in the crotch. That was very much like this play and the experience this guy has."
The SantaLand Diaries, which opens Friday at American Stage, is Sedaris' greatest hit, a short story by the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and other comic tales, many first performed by him on NPR's This American Life. Read by Sedaris, it is a bestselling audio book.
As a stage piece, Sedaris' story has become something of an alternative to the seasonal saturation of saccharine Nutcrackers and Christmas Carols, a mordant take on the less romantic reality of the holidays.
"The audience that's going to like this is anybody that needs a laugh at the stressful elements of this time of year," Boyd said. "People put so much pressure on themselves. People have high expectations of what Christmas should be like. You get mad, stressed-out people. People that are going to like this are people that need a little catharsis, humorous catharsis at the stuff that's weighing you down at this time of year."
The SantaLand Diaries stage adaptation is 26 pages long, thick with prose, all to be spoken by Boyd in the performance, which runs about an hour with no intermission. But first he had to memorize it. Even though he did the play once before in Nashville, he had to relearn it.
"The memorization is tedious, but I don't find it daunting," he said. "I start from the beginning. I basically break it down into sentences and paragraphs. I start one sentence at a time. I read it out loud three times off the page, and then I see if I've got it. I move on whenever I've got it. Whenever I don't have it, I go back to the beginning."
He can't recall having a serious memory loss onstage - "going up" on a line, in theater parlance - and doesn't miss having other actors to give him cues. "It might be a little easier just because I'm not waiting for someone else; I'm on my own cue," he said.
Wendy Leigh is directing Boyd in the production, which is quite different from the one he did in Nashville. "We've got a multilevel set, and I go up and down stairs," he said. "In Nashville, it was just a flat, bare stage. And I like where Wendy's going with this. She's pushing me to find the truth in the character as well as being funny and going for the bits. She's pushing me to find the truth that underlies it, which is always better; it makes for a richer performance."
To Boyd, the show is more than a comedy act. He sees his character, whose elf name is Crumpet, as having universal qualities.
"You're talking about a guy out in the world struggling to find his niche, who ends up having to do something he really doesn't want to do to survive," he said. "Any terrible job you've ever had or when you've had to slave away at something has, in my experience, produced some serious insight on human nature and produced a lot of comedy along with it."
Crumpet is 33, so his SantaLand job is not exactly the lark it might have been for someone 10 years younger. "That adds an element, too, because the stakes get higher, I think, as you get older, especially for actors," Boyd said.
In Nashville, Boyd has done a lot of children's theater, from Hansel and Gretel to Jungle Book. He met his wife, also an actor, while "doing children's theater when I was playing a young beach bum in (a play set in) the Orkney Islands of Scotland," he said.
In Shakespeare, he has played Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, Laertes in Hamlet, Sebastian in Twelfth Night. He worked with American Stage artistic director Todd Olson on productions of The Miracle Worker and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, both at Olson's former company, Tennessee Repertory Theatre.
In 2002, he had an unusual acting job. Along with his wife and another actor, he made up the Crystal Cruise Lines Repertory Theatre, performing for more than four months on an around-the-world cruise. "We had seven different pieces that we did," he said. "A Neil Simon medley, some Shakespeare, a pared-down version of Art, stuff like that."
Boyd saw the world at pretty decent terms of employment - $500 a week plus room and board and passenger's privileges on the luxury liner - but not without some drawbacks. "A cage with golden bars is still a cage in the end," he said. "It's a long time to be at sea. The adventure was very cool, but the politics on a ship are difficult to deal with."
With such an eclectic resume, Boyd is accustomed to the uncertainty of his profession. AfterSantaLand Diaries, for example, "I don't have anything until March," he said.
"Right now January and February are a big blank slate. Fortunately, my wife just got a job. She's doing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in January. When I get back from Christmas, I'll be scrambling, looking for work. It might be some kind of SantaLand job for a while."
PREVIEW: The SantaLand Diaries, by David Sedaris, opens Friday and runs through Dec. 21 at American Stage, 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, Tue.-Thur. 7:30 p.m., Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. and Sun. at 3 and 8 p.m. $22-$32. Preview tonight at 7:30; $18. 727 823-7529 or www.americanstage.org
