Word: mattering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Patrick's script comments wryly on religion. Bunny, a "you-all" type from the southwestern United States, played with high humor by Louise Latham, claims as her faith "extinctionism." In her credo, "nothing matters... God created man to become extinct; in fact, the world ended six hundred years ago." Since, therefore, Bunny doesn't really exist, her cult tells her "anything I do doesn't matter--it's a divine religion...
...Through the Ooze. Scientist Teilhard believes in evolution, not just as a matter of accepting Darwin; evolution for him is the mystical key to existence, the movement of the universe toward God. But God does not appear in Teilhard's book until the very end, and then under a different name...
...beginning is matter. Matter is "atomic" in that it exhibits plurality, to the microscope, the telescope or the naked eye-"in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead." Matter also exhibits unity-something holds it together. "We do not get what we call matter as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms. For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first but which in the end it must perforce...
Undramatic though the play is, the final trouble lies less with subject matter than with form. Had Silent Night been not a full play but a longish one-acter, it might have had a special appeal. It could, just long and lyrically enough, have chronicled a meeting and sustained a mood-and with no tossed-in newlyweds, no shaky final scene. Unfortunately, as a one-acter it would not fit the Broadway scheme of things, though as a full-length play it scarcely fits it either...
...depth. A young male invalid, living with his rich aunt and uncle, develops an obsessive womanish curiosity about manners and motives. He becomes acute enough to predict the exact course of his relatives' household skirmishing, and concludes therefore that he understands the skirmishers. His error does not matter until he begins analyzing Monsieur Martereau, a family friend-a steady, solid-seeming fellow who agrees to buy a house for the uncle. Martereau drives the young man to distraction by his oxlike simplicity. "Words are not for him what they are for me," the invalid muses, "thin protective capsules that...