Word: ionesco
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PEOPLE SOMETIMES leave an Ionesco play feeling stupid. A crazy avalanche of absurdity has careened down and bowled them over, and they're left almost punchy, distanced from the world. Some intellectual force of habit makes them feel uneasy, as though they are missing out by not having a clear picture of what arises out of Rhinocerous or The Bald Soprano--some coherent and all-embracing recollection of a theme on all its levels...
...BALD SOPRANO got its title when a rehearsing actor missed his lines before the opening performance and delivered something about a bald soprano. Eugene Ionesco liked the term enough to keep it as the play's name, and it's as good a label...
Elements of drawing room comedy and theatre of the absurd clash to give Ionesco's play the kind of dramatic tension that makes it simple to perform. A staccato delivery of lines can gloss over non-sequiturs and permits the development of superficially logical chains of reasoning with incredible conclusions, all with the general end of lampooning the English middle class...
...Ionesco's Soprano is a small play that benefits from a small theatre; its intensely malicious approach would lose all its humor if played in a bigger setting, and Davis's production took advantage of the intimacy of the Ex. Like too many contemporary comedies-of-manners. The Bald Soprano, lacking any remarkable feats of inspiration appended by the director, would probably seem a little empty on any larger stage...
Victims of Duty by Ionesco. Loeb Ex. 7:30. May 11-13. Free tickets at box office at noon the preceding...