Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest-the existence problem...
...greatest playwright-Bertolt Brecht. Despite his seemingly stubborn Marxism, Brecht is intimately concerned with the existence problem. His plays are drenched in fatality, and to call fate "economic necessity" is to change the name without changing the game. While they do not all belong to the theater of the absurd, these playwrights possess that initial recognition of absurdity that, Camus argues, comes to one in the midst of deadening routines. In the opening scene of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter hurls a newspaper to the floor and says: "Why do I do this every Sunday...
...absurd thing is," says Director Marre, "that when you catch one like this it's not worth thousands, it's worth millions. Ridiculous, isn't it? You might even say quixotic...
...have produced chemical or metabolic changes as preconditions of samadhi, satori, or the beatific vision. It has even been suggested that many extremes of asceticism were developed because, for some reason, drugs ceased to be available. But, to the orthodox Christian, "technological" or "chemical" mysticism is either blasphemous or absurd. The man who gets to a mountaintop in a funicular has the same view as the man who climbs the peak, but the effort of getting there is important too; the vision is not all, and manuals of contemplation often advise against paying too much attention to "beauty." Indeed...
...TAKE IT WITH YOU. George Kaufman and Moss Hart's 30-year-old tour de farce is a riotous reminder that absurd may mean wacky, not world-weary, that humor, after all, may be amusing rather than bruising...