Holiday bizarre

Imagining A Sid and Nancy Xmas

By Robert von Stein Redick

Sid & Nancy Xmas plays at the Skinny through December 23.

THE HAPPY COUPLE: Christine Louise Marshall and Mike Dow as Nancy and Sid.

Let’s just say I slept through the Sex Pistols. During the 26 months that the world’s first punk band flew, blazing and spitting, across the pop-music firmament, I was a young boy in Iowa (honestly), and not for any money will I reveal the sort of music I listened to. As of last week I had never heard a song by Johnny Rotten and the boys — though I can just recall a snarled, off-key, and utterly satisfying rendition of My Way. I’ve never worn chains, and have never gone to a concert hoping to see it break down into a generalized riot. Naturally I was a shoe-in to review A Sid & Nancy Xmas, which opened Friday at the Skinny.

It begins (and ends, for that matter) something like this: the children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of heroin danced in their heads. That much at least seems safe to assume: if our heroes have room for other dreams, they give no sign of them. The bed — ransacked, littered with trash and clothes — sits in the center of a Chelsea Hotel room in New York City. At the rear is a two-foot high tree, in the foreground a small television of the kind you haven’t seen since, well, around this time: December 1977. The protagonists, dressed in rags and (in her case) black lingerie, sprawl over each other as if chloroformed in the middle of a wrestling match. A loud clatter at the door fails to revive them, but when the local dealer (Guy Durichek) struts in waving a baggy of white powder, the sleepyheads snap to. Are they buying? Only, it seems, on credit: the couple has no money and, as Nancy bellows at Sid after the pusher storms out, no prospects. Sid can’t play a lick, and smacked up as he is, can’t expect to land a gig.

This room in the Chelsea was one of the real couple’s low-rent sanctuaries after the band’s self-destructive 12-day tour of the United States. It is also the place where, 10 months after this play’s moment of (relative) domestic bliss, Nancy Spungen would be found under a sink with a hunting knife in her stomach. Arrested and charged with the crime, Sid Vicious would be released on bail in early 1979 and die of an overdose on February 2.

No, it’s not your average theatrical stocking-stuffer, but then Sid and Nancy weren’t your average kids either. Sid was a fanatic fan, drafted into the group when the other players broke the news to the original bassist, Glen Matlock, that he wasn’t cut out to be a Pistol. Sid was pale, gaunt, and brutal — hurling bottles at techies, assaulting strangers and visitors — a product of postwar hopelessness and boredom in 1970s Britain. Nancy was a prostitute, a strip dancer, and a doper who quickly hooked Sid on the heroin that would eventually kill him. She was also violent enough to freak out the very band that liked to physically attack its audience.

You’d hardly guess it from A Sid & Nancy Xmas, though, where the couple’s worst antics are raised voices. In fact, a few more antics might have helped Kevin Scott’s play along. As the leads, Mike Dow and Christine Louise Marshall spend the first third of the drama (so to speak) leaping in and out of coitus, screaming obscenities at each other and a few well-wishing visitors, and looking lost. A lot of the latter. Eventually a plot emerges: Sid is to be dropped into the midst of a deranged NBC Christmas special of “red-tag” celebrities, specifically Tina Turner, John Belushi, and Taxi’s Tony Danza.

What a gas! Surely pure bedlam erupts. No, not quite: only adulterated bedlam, although even that produces some wonderful moments. When Belushi first joins Sid on the NBC soundstage, his over-the-top intensity is just what we hope for. “Sid Fucking Vicious! Sid Fucking Vicious! Man, I wasn’t even going to do this piece of shit until I heard you were here!” So are Dow’s blasé rejoinders (“It’s just Sid Vicious”), and his incredulous question afterwards: “Who the fok was that?”

The rest of the play’s bright points are largely limited to the chemistry between these two sluggers, as when, in a half-baked nativity scene, they decide that myrrh is something to be smoked. But despite a menacing, leggy strut, Tina (Nancy Mossa) isn’t allowed to cause any trouble at all, and Danza (Seth Burnham) has even less to do. The pyrotechnics of, say, Nicholas Roeg’s mad film Insignificance, in which Marilyn Monroe seduces Albert Einstein, are not even approached here, and the lost opportunity is palpable.

Scott’s play never quite attempts satire. Its goals are apparently limited to a bit of shallow fun with the assembled weirder-than-life stars, and especially the personality cult of the title roles. And sure, it’s funny. Who wouldn’t laugh (from the safety of the audience) when Nancy, hoping a present will contain drug money but finding only fruitcake, tears open the window to howl, “I hate fruitcake! Fuck you, gramma!”

But in my non-punker naiveté, I grow more uneasy with every hour’s reflection. Vicious and Spungen were real people, even if their lives were appropriated by colossal marketing machines. Certainly those lives were pathetic. But were they fun? In particular, was their heroin addiction anything but devastatingly sad?

I’m not the one to answer, but maybe the Sex Pistols are. Johnny Rotten, looking back on his friend’s habit, told filmmaker Julien Temple: “I despised Sid for it, and I’ll despise anyone for messin’ with it ever since. It is the only drug that absolutely cancels out all creativity. It is the lowest, worst form of life.”

And Sid himself, in Temple’s The Filth and the Fury, said of heroin: “It’s the worst sickness you can ever imagine . . . it drives you insane.”

For me, the fun leaks away from this evening when I think of A Sid & Nancy Xmas as a joke at the expense of two castoff junkies, arbitrarily famous and stumbling towards death. Perhaps I should just lighten up? The day a survivor of Sid and Nancy’s kind of life suggests it, I’ll try.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.