Word: absurdist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Newly relaxed censorship restrictions now open the way for distribution of Havel's essays and plays, which are often likened to the absurdist works of Ionesco and Beckett. What Czechoslovaks will discover is a painstaking attention to the elaborate web of falsification that for so long enabled a despised leadership to maintain its grip. Havel's work depicts the idiocy of entrenched bureaucracies and the power of language to twist and distort ideas. It also highlights the unwitting complicity of ordinary citizens in the maintenance of totalitarian regimes. "Everyone is in fact involved and enslaved," Havel once told TIME. "Each...
...dramatic turn in Prague, playwright Vaclav Havel, leader of Czechoslovakia's human rights movement, said wryly, "We cannot rule out the situation that all occupiers of this country will have renounced the occupation, and only the occupied will still stand behind it." Added Havel, who is known for his absurdist dramas: "It is like something out of my own plays...
...told that Lawrence is an agoraphobic. We are told that Joanna is pregnant. And we are told that they cannot pay their rent. At first, these sound like problems that any audience could relate to. Yet all of these givens lose their meanings in the context of the absurdist world that Wilson creates...
...absurdist nightmare, a story that all but defied the Western imagination. A middle-aged author, born in Bombay but for many years resident in London, writes a long, sardonic novel, by turns philosophical and comic and fantastic. In the book's opening scene, two middle-aged Indian actors fall 29,002 feet from a jetliner that has just been exploded by terrorists over the English Channel. They have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth; they land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about...
KINGFISH. Buck Henry is a prissy-elegant queen who tangles with a hustler in Marlane Meyer's absurdist farce at the Los Angeles Theater Center...