Blame playwright Jeff Goode for bringing dark Christmas stories to your local theater.

Not long ago, Christmas theater was awash in happy endings, redemption, and sugarplums. Then Goode snatched Clement Clarke Moore's reindeer from the sky, plopped them on a nearly bare stage, and had them recite monologues about what really happened to Vixen one foggy Christmas Eve.

"The Eight: Reindeer Monologues," Goode's darkly funny, twisted tale about sexual harassment and cover-up at the North Pole had a staged reading in Chicago in 1993. In 1994, it debuted on seven stages across the United States, including Madison's Brave Hearts Theater. Since then, the provocative play has been performed in theaters throughout the world. This year it will be staged in locales as disparate as Ashtabula, Ohio and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Thursday afternoon, I talked with Goode about "The Eight" and his newest Christmas play, the even darker "Seven Santas," currently being presented at Madison's Bartell Theater by Stage Q. Goode had just returned from Belgium, where he attended the premiere of the Dutch version of "De acht: Monologen van Rendieren" in Ostend.

When Goode wrote "The Eight," he believed we (or at least some of us) were culturally ready, perhaps even thirsty, for a different, less uplifting and less treacly Christmas play – an alternative to that seasonal box office cash cow, "A Christmas Carol," as well as the high-kicking dance routines of the Rockettes.

"People really responded to being able to laugh at something dark," he says. "That first year the play got rave reviews."

Among the early fans of "The Eight" was Los Angeles Times reviewer Don Shirley, who called it "wickedly funny" and "a Christmas comedy for the age of the daytime talk show."

Count me in as an early fan, too. I saw the first three productions in Madison – all directed by Cheryl Snodgrass; each performed on a different stage with a different cast – but didn’t have an opportunity to review the first two. I gave that third performance, in 1997, a strong, positive review (that also appears on Goode's website, albeit sans one critical paragraph). In 2001, I wrote another positive review of "The Eight" when Michael Bruno directed it for Stage Q.


The success of "The Eight" prompted other playwrights to create more alternatives to the traditional offerings, and less than 15 years after Goode's articulate reindeer spilled the beans about Santa's unseemly behavior, there are many alternatives to "A Christmas Carol," most too risquŽ or dark for children who still believe in the jolly old elf.

But as much as they loved "The Eight," many people weren't entirely satisfied with it, says Goode. They wanted to know Santa's side of the story, too.

Goode, however, was reluctant to write another play just to cash in the chips he'd acquired from the success of "The Eight." Instead, he says, "I was waiting for a good idea."

In 2006, inspiration arrived, fueled by actor Mel Gibson's DUI arrest and accompanying anti-Semitic rant. In "Seven Santas," Mr. Claus has an accident while driving his sleigh, and subsequently finds himself standing up at a court-mandated AA meeting and announcing that he's an alcoholic.

The play's seven Santas are versions of what people think about Santa, explains Goode. There's a familiar-looking Santa, a Santa saint, and a celebrity Santa, as well as four other variations. Mrs. Claus puts in an appearance, too.

"Seven Santas" is "not literally a sequel" to "The Eight," says Goode; but it is meant to appeal to the same sort of audiences. Nonetheless, he worries the new play will be compared to the older one and found wanting. "It's a very trick play, and it worries me because it's much harder to do," he says.

Part of the reason for the popularity of "The Eight" is logistical, he explains. It's inexpensive to do and thus accessible to many small theater companies. It consists of eight separate monologues and the characters do not interact with each other, so it's easy for actors to rehearse on their own.

In contrast, the second half of "Seven Santas" features an octet, a very difficult eight-part, overlapping dialogue with a lot of nuances. It requires much more ensemble rehearsal time. "You can't half-ass this play," warns Goode: "Companies that used it as a last-minute replacement [and didn't rehearse it very much] got terrible reviews."

Goode says "Seven Santas," which is being performed by four theater companies this year, "is doing very well, but I couldn't tell you if it will do better than 'The Eight.'" If people appreciate the eight-part dialogue as a form of poetry, Goode predicts "Seven Santas" will be a huge hit; if not, he believes it will flop.

Even if "Seven Santas" is as huge a hit as "The Eight," Goode won't be getting rich from royalties. He says "The Eight" pays for his Christmas presents, but isn't a year-round source of income because of its seasonal appeal. "No matter how well it's doing, it closes after three weeks," he explains.

Goode has written 50-70 other plays ("depending on how you count them"), all of which have been produced, but he's done a lot of other writing, too, Since moving to Los Angeles in 1997 to get away from cold Midwestern winter, he's written "quite a few television pilots." He is also the creator of the Disney animated series "American Dragon: Jake Long."

After spending Christmas back in the cold and snowy Midwest, the next big thing on Goode's schedule is a trip to Washington, D.C. In October, he bet himself on the outcome of the November election and bought a plane ticket so he could attend Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009. He doesn't have a hotel reservation and doesn't know where he'll be staying, but that isn't a deterrent: Even if this playwright doesn't have a reserved front row seat at this dramatic event, he says, "I'll be one of four million people at the inauguration, at the back of the crowd."

Stage Q will perform "Seven Santas" at 10:30 p.m. Friday, December 19 and Saturday, December 20, 2008 at the Bartell Theatre, 113 East Mifflin Street in Madison. Tickets are $10. For reservations or additional information, call (608) 204-0280 or visit the Stage Q website.