The romantic play Santa Cruz outlined the main lines of Max Frisch's work. The main theme of his books is often the desire of a person to break the deadening monotony of his daily reality at any cost, to escape from the gray routine, which day after day kills all vital energy, all interest and will to live. Such an escape is possible only with the help of a game, when the killing routine is the seriousness that is opposed to a world where there are strong feelings, vivid impressions, joy, suffering, magic and a number of equally probable possibilities that give a person genuine freedom. Frisch's characters are most often ordinary people, unremarkable until a certain point, when they suddenly realize that they are prisoners of their everyday reality, where there is no place for romance, and routine daily life is equivalent to a slow death. The game in the work is presented at the level of the character system: there is an image of an adventurer hero who embodies the game. The masked hero creates his own life according to the laws of art, so the concept of «life creation» is key to understanding the play's issues. At the level of intrigue, the romantic motive of sleep is significant, which acquires very unusual functions. Keywords: comedy, game, creation of life, dream, play-romance, playing field, game levels.
For citation: Kiseleva I.S. Sleep and Life Creation in Max Frisch's Play “Santa Cruz”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 2, pp. 42—47.