Comedy-Drama/ Multiple Characters, flexible casting/ Full Length, five short plays
Synopsis:
(from The Portland Phoenix): “Playwright Daniel Curzon explains that he wrote Christmas Naughty and Nice ‘to vent his inner Grinch, to make angels weep, and because he has sold his soul to the Devil.’ That gives you a fair indication of the range of tones expressed over the course of the show’s five plays.
“At one end, we have the humor of precocious adolescents. In the opening play, ‘Honest Christmas Presents,’ family members give what they really want to give, with varying degrees of cleverness: Tween Melissa in headgear gets dog doo from her brother Billy; Mom gets a ‘pile remover’ from Dad, who in return gets a penis enlarger.
“At the far end of the show’s range, we have the drama ‘A Christmas Mistake.’ The heartstring-pulling ‘Mistake’ looks in on a man remembering a past Christmas Eve, when he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with his young daughter. The mistake of the title happens when the girl, who is fated to die the next year, believes a homeless man, who is about to jump, to be Santa Claus.
“The most interesting and unexpected of the plays is ‘A Christmas Miracle,’ in which two military men in uniform at a mess hall Christmas Eve party hide their love and lust in full sight. Like Naughty and Nice itself, it melds the perversely funny with the poignant.”
“Melds the perversely funny with the poignant . . . . studded with moments of both hilarity and quiet power.”
– The Portland Phoenix
Amateur and professional rights:
Daniel Curzon
416 Dorado Terrace
San Francisco, California
USA 94112
Email: curzon@pacbell.net
About the Playwright: Daniel Curzon’s works include the novel Something You Do in the Dark (1971), The World Can Break Your Heart(1984), Superfag (1996) and Not Necessarily Nice: stories (1998), as well as the plays My Unknown Son (Circle Rep Lab, New York, 1987) and 1001 Nights at the House of Pancakes (San Francisco, 1998). Godot Arrives won the Southwest Theatre Association’s 1999 National New Play Contest, and was first produced by the California Travel Troupe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2000.
He has also written and published non-gay fiction and plays. His plays, both gay and non-gay, have been produced in several cities.
Christmas Naughty and Nice was first produced by Dark Water Theatre Company, Portland, Maine in 2009.