Word: esslin
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...find it highly ironic that MaryBeth A. Muchmore summed up her review of the play The Day of the Dogs (Arts, April 10) by accusing it of "veer[ing] a little too far into the realm of absurdity." Had the reviewer been familiar with Martin Esslin's The Theater of the Absurd, an indespensible text for anyone studying 20th century theater, she would have known that elements of the play with which she found fault are, point for point, markers of absurd theatre...
...interpret his plays, a good guide is a necessity. He exists in Martin Esslin (The Peopled Wound; Doubleday; $5.95). Author of The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: The Man and His Work, Esslin is a genial host of a critic. He shares an avant-garde playwright with his readers in the same enthusiastic way that he might recommend an excellent little restaurant slightly off the tourist track. The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about...
Winning Humility. In approaching the substructure of Pinter's dramas, Esslin is appropriately psychoanalytical. To take a hard line on the "meaning" of a Pinter play is like taking a hard line on the meaning of a sunrise. In his play-by-play analysis, Esslin displays a winning humility. He is never arbitrary about imposing interpretations...
...immediate reaction of many playgoers was that no wife and mother would behave that way. But, as Esslin keeps saying, Pinter is an existential playwright. His brief basic creed holds that human nature is not fixed and ordained, either by divine law or some ingrained edict governing the behavior of the species. Man instead defines himself in moment-to-moment acts that may be quite contradictory. This accounts for the breath-stopping power of the totally unexpected in a Pinter play...
...certain actualities of the situation, such as one man cannot sit, the other cannot stand. It seemed like it would be extremely limiting to get very involved in the question of whether Hamm and Cloy are two parts of the same men-which I've heard a thousand times, Esslin is one of the people who says this, the divided self - you know...