Word: ionesco
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...EMOTIONS of bored and dying men are the fabric of Ionesco's dramas. He expresses them with wonderful simplicity. Dilemmas are couched in the profound power of articulated feeling, not in metaphor or metaphysics. His characters speak with ever-expanding honesty and urgency, evoking the most elemental human feelings...
...this sort of confusion is not the playwright's objective. Ionesco seems to want his audience to experience the absurdity of life, not to understand it. He wants us to give ourselves over to the experience as though it were reality itself, and accept the insights, the laughter and the horrors like a volley of random shots--some hit, and some don't "Conclusions" are not only unimportant, they contradict the salient point...
This lack of distancing serves another purpose. In Ionesco, style is a matter of short, enigmatic statements couched between ramblings of apparent irrelevancy, nothing following logically. With so little attention paid to causation, the words seem disconnected from the character who speaks them, from the setting, and from the dramatic situation. Thus the language is constantly in danger of appearing so far out of context that it zooms up to epigrammatic proportions dripping with symbolic significance. In general, this kind of pedestal profundity is undesirable: the Hub's production leaves...
...THIS is not to say that an Ionesco play should be a cozy, gather-round-the-fireside affair. If we should remain close to the action, then we should also be appalled by what we see. In order to help us draw back in horror, the thick and ghastly paste of wrinkled contortion that the players call make-up gives things a masked, tragic look. Ionesco deemed the play a "tragic farce," and the bare, microcosmic setting fortifies the impression of Greek drama: it caters to the essential formality built into the play...
...Chairs is a play that can usually carry its own weight, even when the production goes limp from time to time. If you like Ionesco, then this production is professional enough to hit hard in a sporadic...