Then One Foggy Christmas Eve

With Alexis Kozak

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THIS PLAY AND WHERE DO THE CHARACTERS COME FROM?

Maybe this play began as a fascination with the layaway at the Two Guys department store that my father worked at when I was a kid. Or maybe it was the one paragraph story in the newspaper about a store manager in middle America whose store was graced by a “Secret Santa” who paid off its layaway. Or maybe it was that I couldn’t believe that Then One Foggy Christmas Eve hadn’t been used as a movie or play title.  (Go ahead, Google it. You’ll see.) 

I have tried many times to write plays that capture the holiday spirit. The problem is, it can’t be bottled. The minute December 26^th rolls around, the energy of the season begins to drop out. Every November, I would say to myself, “Oh yeah, maybe I will finish that Christmas play this year.” Each year, I started work on Foggy earlier and earlier, trying to outrun the Christmas deadline, and every year I would fail. That is, of course, until I started working on it in June.   

For four years, this play was the story of two brothers dueling over a Christmas book that one of the brothers turned into a movie script and became famous for and then came back to pay off the layaway. I often write about bad family situations, but, in this case, it was just no darn fun. The writing of the play would stall out, because I was trying too hard to copy real life. I finally came to the realization that a play is fiction after all, right? The evil Hollywood brother became steel magnate Jebediah Zagalon. The newspaper’s store manager became Rudy Reins. And with that, everything else began to fall into place. 

All that, and, I am suspicious of a world with no magic.  So, let’s believe a little bit.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PART OR LINE IN THE PLAY?  WHY?

I love the idea that Santa might have a secret weapon that he is using to secretly hold the Earth hostage…because maybe he does.  So I love that Wolf gets to act out Santa’s destruction of the planet and then faces down the store’s own photo Santa.

WHAT DID YOU TRY TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS PLAY?

I wanted to create a world with magic in it. I truly believe that there is magic in the real world. As a playwright, I think that a sense of the unexplainable lifts scripts that would otherwise be television to a higher theatrical level. I also wanted a leading character with a huge character arc, what I think of as a one-eighty, where a character starts in one place or direction and totally swings to the complete opposite by the end of the play.