goTriad.com

A department store "Santa" who refuses to break character, "elf" co-workers who used to work on TV soap operas and a kid encouraged by his parent to urinate on an indoor winter wonderland? It's all in a day's work for Crumpet, the main character of "The Santaland Diaries."

Adapted from the hilarious essay "Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris, an author and former North Carolina resident, the show delves into the frustrations and horrors the writer experienced firsthand while working as an elf at Macy's Santaland in New York City.

This season, the one-man show returns for its third year at Triad Stage with Greensboro native Bing Putney playing the lead role of Crumpet.

We spoke with Putney about Sedaris, his worst Christmas memory and how he learned his lines.

As a North Carolinian, do you feel sort of a regional sense of pride or at least a regional connection in the fact that Sedaris spent a good portion of his life in North Carolina?

Yeah, absolutely. Reading a lot of stories where he mentions Raleigh and some of the different cultural oddities to this region perhaps, it's really nice to be able to sort of relate to that and understand where he's coming from. There's currently a movement to give the South a new and refreshing voice of its own, and I think David Sedaris is definitely a part of that.

This play is almost like a live reading of the David Sedaris essay "Santaland Diaries" except that, unlike Sedaris, you're going from memory instead of the book.

How did you tackle the challenge of memorizing an entire essay?

It definitely took some time. I started learning my lines back in September. I got the script in the middle of August and read through it a few times, and then starting in September, I would just try and put in, you know, an hour a day. Some days, I wouldn't get to it, of course. But, yeah, just going through section by section, line by line, committing everything to memory. It took a little while, but I'm just about there at this point.

When you're playing Crumpet, are you playing this character through some sort of representation of David Sedaris?

No, not too much. We decided to sort of steer clear of trying to be too authentic to David Sedaris himself, just for purposes of keeping the play as lively and as fresh and as honest as possible. We're putting it on in the cabaret space, which is an intimate little space, so it really lends itself well to interfacing with the audience that's right there and just talking directly to them. So, we thought that aiming the character more based on what's in the script rather than on David Sedaris himself would be more effective.

This show is one gigantic, horrible Christmas memory in a lot of ways. What was your worst Christmas memory?

I guess I recall one point where I must have been really young. It's pretty far back there, but it was before Christmas during the mad Christmas shopping season, and I had gone with my dad to Kmart or Walmart or one of those, and it was the year that the Nintendo 64 was the big, hot item that everybody wanted. It was like two days before Christmas, and my dad decided that this was going to be an early present. He wanted me to go ahead and pick it out myself because he wanted to make sure to get the right thing.

So, we get there, and it's crazy and packed, and I think we ended up finding the very last game system that I wanted, and we picked it up, and we were excited as we kept looking through the store to grab a few other things and buy last-minute presents. I think we must have sat it down behind us on the floor or something while looking through the other things, and someone else saw it on the floor, and they picked it up.

We caught them, and we had to say, "No, no, no, that was ours! We caught the last one. We got it off the shelf." Then they said, "Uh, I think you were standing down the aisle from it, so that means it's ours."

So, we had to get the manager on duty at the store involved, and they had to piece through who got to buy that last Nintendo 64, and of course, I'm just sitting there, what, 11 years old or something, and I'm completely embarrassed that everyone's making this huge scene and the manager on duty at this crazy, busy department store has to spend time handling our little dispute.

But in the end, we managed to walk away with the last Nintendo 64, so it all ended nicely.

Joe Scott is a freelance contributor. Contact him at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.

Newsletter

Learn More

topCars

featured ads

TriadMarketplace.com