ee cummings; playwright.
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings’ most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the Harvard College magazine the Wake.
SANTA CLAUS, Cummings’ second play (1946), is an allegory in five scenes. Its characters are Death, Santa Claus, Mob, Child, and Woman; its medium, blank verse.
As Scene One opens, that symbol of understanding-love, the human family (Santa Claus Woman Child), has disintegrated; each member having lost the others — thanks to an inhuman lust-for-knowledge (Science). In this disintegration, Death, for whom love is lust, sees his chance to possess Woman.
Death’s first attempt is an indirect one: based on the proposition that two negatives make an affirmative. When Santa Claus (in despair at having lost Woman and Child) enters, Death —emanating sympathy — explains that “this is a world of salesmanship” in which “everybody wants knowledge” at any price and that Santa Claus should forget his understanding (”which simply can’t be sold”) and become a salesman of mere knowledge, a Scientist. Taking Santa Claus’ mask, Death gives him his own in exchange and himself puts on the mask of Santa Claus. Death then suggests that, since people (who don’t in themselves any more exist) want (above all) things which don’t exist, Santa Claus should sell the Mob “wheelmines.”
Next (Scene Two) we see our Scientist — Santa Claus masked as Death — in the act of selling nonexistent wheelmines to the nonexistent Mob; whose rampant skepticism is transformed, at the magic name of Science, to wild enthusiasm. But havoc (as Death foresaw) results from the conjunction of the two nonexistences; and this havoc is the subject of the passage here recorded.
Read the play here: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=941324
My project for today: read this. Thanks again to Renee for passing it along.
