Word: absurdities
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Whether or not it is fair to blame Steve's suicide (and the six others that Maliver mentions) on encounter groups, Maliver makes a reasonably strong case that the movement often promotes "the artificial, the shoddy and the absurd" as if they were significant and holds out the "false promise of psychological nirvana." Considerable support for Maliver's view (framed in more temperate language) is to be found in Encounter Groups: First Facts (Basic Books; $15), written for professional readers by University of Chicago Psychologist Morton Lieberman, Stanford University Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom and State University of New York...
...from other art forms. The shorthand of child drawing-the wavy contours and schematic figures, the jammed and frontally flattened space-is as important to a Dubuffet like Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle as perspective space is in a Perugino. Dubuffet used these techniques deliberately to discover how ludicrous, violent or absurd an image a given set of conventions could carry within the context of modern painting. His drawing is stylish to the point of mannerism. Indeed his pictures depend on that context more than his admirers will allow. Madmen understand the art of the mad; children, child art. But when...
...varies from play to play, but in all three works in the present collection, one senses a desperate effort to condemn and at the same time to explain the actions of individuals under Hitler. "This is how people operate," Mrozek seems to be saying. "I'm putting them in absurd situations, of course, but they behaved just as absurdly in a real situation not too long...
...PLAY is more than just a gimmick. Mrozek expands on the absurd situation with dialogue that is eerie because of its casual tone of day-to-day realism. In the short time we spend with them, we develop definite feelings about Mr. I and Mr. II. Through their comments, even the Hand acquires a distinct personality ("Somebody's fingernails could use a good cleaning, if I may venture an opinion," comments...
...which depend on a certain amount of development within the play. Before his works achieve the level they promise, he will have to find his own method of shaping his plays, somewhere in between the formal structure of traditional theater and the intentional formlessness of the Theater of the Absurd. In the meantime, his plays deserve attention purely for their cleverly absurd situations and their casual, flippant dialogue, which combine to produce Mrozek's special brand of ironic humor...