Word: ionesco
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...plays that opened Wednesday night at the Loeb Drama Center, one became an instant blurr in my memory, and I trust the Loeb will be able to get over it as easily. The other--Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson,--pretty much redeemed the evening...
...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...
...existence comes to a halt in Beckett, it is absurdly speeded up in the work of Eugene Ionesco. When the clock strikes 17 in the first scene of his first play, The Bald Soprano, it sounds the meaning of all his plays: "The universe is out of control." Better than any other playwright, Ionesco has captured the ludicrous panic that invades modern man in an age of rapidly changing technology. An ardent admirer of the Marx Brothers, Ionesco produces tragic farce by using the proliferation and acceleration of physical objects-much the way that the Marx Brothers in A Night...
...makes the plot and story line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter does this almost subliminally with poetically repetitive speech patterns...
This kind of thematic material doesn't lend itself to irony. So even when Babe flirts with Ionesco in a scene where you can't tell who is the loony and who the patient, the whole thing floats on soap bubbles...