Word: absurdist
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...that the playwright is flailing. Tina Howe (The Art of Dining, Coastal Disturbances) probably meant ONE SHOE OFF, which opened off-Broadway last week, as a poetic comment on the corrosive effects of professional failure on personal life, combined with a feminist fantasy of zipless fulfillment. Instead of an absurdist Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? her tale of two unhappy couples at a fiasco of a dinner party resembles sketch comedy -- wacky whimsies stitched together, abasing an able cast. The one memorable notion: an abundance of unwanted vegetables flourishing everywhere inside, not outside, a crumbling country house...
THEATER An absurdist comedy about a nutty clan...
Wojewodski's successor, Irene Lewis, demonstrates her own facility for nurturing new work in Escape from Happiness, a high-energy absurdist comedy about a nutty blue-collar family entangled with drug dealing, pornography, police corruption and an overabundance of soup. The play is at Center Stage through March 14, then moves on to Yale, which is co-producing the show...
Dorf's comic sense serves him much better than his philosophical nature. From the opening line of the play, "I killed the reference librarian," Dorf displays his absurdist flair. Scott Schwartz's direction aggressively matches that sensibility...
Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist...