Word: absurdist
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...week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Part narrative epic, part rock opera, part home movie, United States is a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, aphoristic examination of 20th century life in 78 segments, lasting six hours and taking two evenings to perform. Wagnerian in its scope, Carrollian in its absurdist wit, Carsonian in its deadpan, stand-up-comic timing, Anderson's work is the biggest, most ambitious and most successful example to date of the avant-garde hybrid known as performance...
Apparently repentant at charging full price for a half-length evening, Cherson has tacked on after the performance one of Beckett's self-directed made-for-T.V. shorts, untitled Ghost Trio, it makes Krapp's Last Tape look like Oklahoma! by comparison. While hardcore absurdist buffs may find this collection of long, gray pauses and slow, expressionless voices interesting Ghost Trio acts primarily as a soporific and is assuredly not worth staying for. Better to walk out during the brief intermission between the shows, however gingerly, with the oppressive miasma of Krapp still fresh in your mind...
...earliest one-acter, The Room (1957), to his latest drama, Betrayal-begins on a note of nervous apprehension. What proceeds after that is not the unfolding of a plot but the revelation of a state of being, a kind of black comic hell consisting of menace, panic, boredom and absurdist non sequiturs. His characters are caught in seemingly desperate and openly despairing situations that cannot be ameliorated and that may end in psychological or physical violence...
Neil Simon is probably tired of hearing that his work subsists on absurdist non sequiturs, deli-flavored New York humor and crisp punch-liners. So what else is new? Not Little Me, alas...
...setting is a terrace of a posh hotel overlooking the harbor at Nice, and the first lines addressed to him are from Noel Coward's Private Lives. The plots thicken and boil. Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days are intermingled as well. With zany aplomb, Durang combines absurdist juxtapositions of lines and characters in Spelvin's massive identity crisis...