Harry Kondoleon
Harry Kondoleon was an American playwright, poet, and novelist whose impactful career was cut short by his battle with AIDS, which he was diagnosed with in the mid-1980s. Born in 1955 in Forest Hills, New York, Kondoleon demonstrated remarkable talent early on, winning multiple playwriting awards while studying at Hamilton College and Yale University. His works often reflect his disdain for societal greed and hypocrisy, infused with humor and a unique narrative style. One of his most significant one-act plays, *The Fairy Garden*, explores themes of spiritual fatigue through fairy tale elements, while his later works, such as *Zero Positive*, directly address the AIDS crisis. Kondoleon's writing evolved in response to his illness, leading him to publish deeply personal works like *Diary of a Lost Boy*, which chronicles the experience of a young man facing AIDS. Despite his untimely death in 1994, Kondoleon's contributions to theater and literature continue to resonate, reflecting both his creative genius and the struggles he faced in his life.
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Subject Terms
Harry Kondoleon
Playwright
- Born: February 26, 1955
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: March 16, 1994
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Harry Kondoleon’s career as playwright, poet, and novelist ended abruptly in 1994, when he succumbed to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). He was declared HIV positive a decade before, a diagnosis that changed his subsequent writing.
Kondoleon was born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1955. The son of Sophocles, an accountant, and Athena Cola Kondoleon, a secretary, he grew up in Queens. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1977, after which he attended Yale University’s School of Drama. He won Hamilton College’s Wallace Bradley Playwriting Prize in each of his four years in residence. He was quickly recognized as outstanding at Yale. His one-act play The Cote d’Azur Triangle, one of several verse plays he wrote early in his career, along with the one-act play The Brides, won Kondoleon Yale’s Kazan Awards in Playwriting in 1979 and 1980, respectively. The Yale Repertory Company was sufficiently impressed by his writing to mount a production of his full-length play, Rococo, which ran for twelve performances in 198l.
Most of Kondoleon’s early work reveals his anger and intolerance of greed and hypocrisy. His humor is diverting, but his anger lies near the surface. Playwright John Guare, one of Kondoleon’s Yale professors, compared his outlook to that of British novelist Ronald Firbank, whom he urged Kondoleon to read, but the emerging playwright rejected this recommendation because he feared becoming derivative.
The Fairy Garden, widely considered to be Kondoleon’s most significant one-act play, employs fairy tale elements to emphasize the spiritual fatigue of Roman, the leading character, who says that he wants the world to disappear, whereupon Kondoleon accommodatingly obliges. He includes music in this play because he knows that audiences appreciate music. They also like to have characters on stage undress, so he obliges by adding a male stripper to the cast.
The onset of Kondoleon’s illness changed his career substantially. His first public reaction was the publication in 1987 of a thin volume containing eleven of his poems, The Death of Understanding. The poems are filled with images of self-destruction. The following year, he published The Whore of Tjampuan, his first novel, based on experiences he had in Bali when he was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kondoleon’s first play about AIDS is Zero Positive, featuring a protagonist who is HIV positive. The Houseguests, however, with its cast of two couples reminiscent of Edward Albee’s four characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, evaded the topic of AIDS. The play had a verve that attracted audiences and received Kondoleon’s second Obie Award as the best play of the 1992-1993 season. The Fairy Garden had won Kondoleon an Obie a decade earlier as the most promising playwright. His most personal work is his novel Diary of a Lost Boy (1994), a first-person account of the ordeal of a young man dying of AIDS. Kondoleon died shortly after its publication.