Word: absurdly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...into the tawdriest heel is thus lost. In scenes of inane family cackle, and in the spectacle of a cuckolded husband applauding his wife flagrante delicto ("Congratulations, Heloise. You're getting better every time"), Playwright Marceau approaches the existential nausea toward life that animates the "theater of the absurd" (TIME, Dec. 22). Sartre and Camus have obviously influenced Marceau, but the guiding philosophy behind Broadway's Egg seems to be Minsky...
Aspiring & Striving. "All of us French intellectuals have had to come to terms with the same problem," he told a friend last week in the U.S., where he is currently on a lecture tour. "Camus and Sartre and Malraux saw life the way I did-as meaningless and absurd, with war the most meaningless absurdity of all. And yet, instead of withdrawing and doing our best to avoid suffering, which would be the logical course, we all worked hard and risked our lives in the Resistance. Why? Another way of asking this is: What...
Obeying tradition, claims Miss Bethune, does not take away the artist's creative freedom, but simply makes him face facts. Getting the faces wrong, she argues, is as absurd as representing "George Washington with bushy black whiskers or Abraham Lincoln with soft white wig tied with ribbon...
...sifting Esslin's text, three significant plays emerge as historic steps in the development of absurd theater. The first was Ubu Roi, performed in Paris in 1896, and written by Alfred Jarry, a 23-year-old bourgeois baiter. Ubu is a pear-shaped buffoon-monster and a travesty on middle class values, e.g., thrift, family life, patriotism. He punctuates every third line of dialogue with an excremental word. Ubu Roi furnished the absurdists with their basic attitude: shock the bourgeoisie and slam the Establishment. In a 1923 play, In the Jungle of the Cities, Bertolt Brecht furnished the theater...
Marx Bros. Plus Myths. After Beckett, the absurdist message is crystallized: life is a tragic farce. The absurdist reasoning goes like this: death makes any act of life futile, hence farcical, the funny side of absurdity. But if "God is dead," as Nietzsche proclaimed and the theater of the absurd assumes, then the universe itself is senseless, the tragic side of absurdity. For all their bravado, the playwrights of the absurd are inconsolable at the vision of a godless universe, but they regard their audiences as complacent, apathetic, asleep. With taunts and shock effects, by continually destroying illusion to remind...