Skip to main content

Murder on the North Pole Express

Murder on the North Pole Express
The Santaland Diaries Explores the Dark Side of Customer Service
David Sedaris first aired his essay The Santaland Diaries on NPR’s Morning Edition on December 23rd, 1992. It has become a staple of the Christmas Season ever since. After twenty years it probably qualifies as “tired,” “trite,” “venerable,” or “shopworn.” But let’s face it: pieces like The Santaland Diaries, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the film Holiday Inn (think of the Irving Berlin song White Christmas,) Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory all satisfy an urgent and powerful need of the human spirit; we need to be connected during the holiday season regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, the Pagan Solstice or the simple pleasures of the Atheist who treasures time spent with family and loved ones.
Actor Mitchell Fain skillfully becomes Crumpet, the Elf, who works at a variety of positions at Macy’s Santaland. One by one he recounts the adventures and absurdities of parents, children, fellow elves and even Santa himself during this seventy-five minute one-man romp through the detritus of Christmas.
This particular version of Sedaris’s essay has been turned into adult theater by Joe Mantello. Some of the language would never make it on the air at NPR and some of the innuendo is definitely borderline XXX. These features are what make The Santaland Diaries resonate so strongly with audience members who have worked in service jobs, customer service positions or who have in general been faced with the daunting task of satisfying the often irrational and unreasonable demands of that mythic and ethereal being, “the customer.”
Fain, appropriately costumed as Crumpet, keeps interest high with interesting blocking and frequent shifts about the Joey Wade designed set that is probably ten times as inviting as anything Macy’s ever offered its clientele. Fain also has the uncanny ability to connect with everyone in the audience simultaneously. You feel as though he is telling you this story of his adventures over coffee at your local Starbucks.
Is there a message here for us all? Of course, there is. Be we’ve already heard it many times before. We know that we’re all obsessed with materialism at Christmas. We all become raging animals because of the incredible stress we experience when the Winter Solstice approaches. It is also worthwhile to hear this message again and again as we struggle to maintain our balance in life while still honoring whatever it is we want to honor at this time of the year. Santaland Diaries reminds us of our innate natures as human beings and cautions us to live a life of balance and fullness without becoming one of the monstrous creatures that made Crumpet’s life the “interesting” experience it was as he worked as an Elf in that magic place called Santaland.
Incidentally, toward the conclusion of Santaland Diaries Crumpet encounters a Santa he’s never worked with before. This Santa’s name was not on the list of regular “Santas” employed by the department store. I was more than touched as Fain/Crumpet recounted how this final Santa was able to satisfy parents and children without ever promising the child great material gifts. It is a brief but poignant moment in Santaland Diaries, but one well worth remembering. Fain handles it with remarkable sensitivity and skill.
Santaland Diaries is highly recommended, even if you’ve seen it before—even if you’ve seen it several times before. If you enjoy repeat performances of this kind of show, to hell with the nay-sayers; what do they know about satisfying your inner needs for connection over the holiday season?  You can do much worse than watch someone as talented and skilled as Mitchell Fain who makes you smile, makes you nod in assent, and who makes you grateful that you at least can choose how you want to celebrate this holiday season.
Santaland Diaries plays at Theater Wit at 1229 West Belmont Avenue on Chicago’s North side through December 31st, 2011. Visit Theater Wit: smart art or phone the box office at 773-975-8150 for tickets.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Life After Facebook

Life After Facebook Reflections on How Life Improves When Social Media Is Abandoned The Problem Most people that use Facebook regularly will quickly admit to the fact that the social media platform is highly addictive as well as an almost complete waste of time. We will do almost anything to generate that endorphin-stimulating "Like" that others bestow on our egos so easily and thoughtlessly. We post meme after meme or make silly and pointless comments or "respond" to someone else's pointless posting with our own pointless emoji so easily delivered. Underlying all of this activity many if not most people will discover, if they look deeply into their own hearts, that the quest is not unlike the quest for the Holy Grail. Like The Quest for the Grail, the reward is to become a highly valued citizen, respected and admired for our perceptive insights and even, perhaps, leadership toward some sort of ShangriLa that is only dimly imagined. Like the Quest for the Gra...

Independence Day, 2021

Independence Day, 2021 Some reflections after a walk in Winnemac Park The Walk I live near Winnemac Park on Chicago's North side, a forty-acre jewel that has five baseball diamonds, a soccer field, a prairie reconstruction, a children's play-lot and some community gardens. It is bordered by Chappell Elementary School on the West and Amundsen High School on the East. (None of the Chappel kids wear full armor to school and most of the Amundsen kids are not blond Swedes despite the Chappel "Knight" mascot and the Amundsen "Viking" mascot.) There are apparently no descendants of knights or vikings around to object to cultural appropriation, so for the moment the mascots are secure in their sinecures. The park also features Jorndt Field, a football field with an artificial surface believed to have a capacity of 6,000 spectators. (I was unable to find a definitive answer to this question using Google.) By walking around the edges of the park and making a back...

The Gentleman Caller

Raven Theater,  6157 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60660 Now thru May 27, 2018 Raven Theater Website Friday evening (April 27, 2018) I had a remarkable experience attending a performance of The Gentleman Caller, a world premier production of a Philip Dawkins play. The play attempts to imagine what might have happened when Tennessee Williams met William Inge in Inge’s St. Louis garden apartment and later in a Chicago hotel room in 1944 and 1945. We don’t know exactly what took place, except that Williams encouraged Inge to pursue play-writing. Dawkins’ script attempts to recreate those moments based on what we know of the two men’s lives. The fact that the program has a credit for David Wooley as Fight & Intimacy Choreographer should alert you to some of the play’s content. (The extent of the fighting was a single face slap as I recall, if that helps you imagine more clearly.) Both Williams and Inge were homosexual, although radically different in their self-acceptance and ultim...