Word: ionesco
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...headquarters for Dracula, the world's first Batman. Heartily Hungarian in mood (it is the capital of the Magyar Autonomous Region), Cluj is an intellectual center that serves Bucharest in much the same way that Cracow does Warsaw, or Leningrad Moscow. There the works of Absurdist Eugene Ionesco get a frequent hearing, and the late Rumanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi is much admired...
...Eugene Ionesco's "comic drama," which was performed in French last weekend by the Lowell House Theatre Francais under the direction of Eduardo Montoya '65, is an excellent satire. The provincial professor is a caricature of an academic personality, and his "lesson" is a parody of the warmed-over humanism with which such a person usually dignifies his futile calling...
Each time that Ionesco's hero is forced to offer a basic explanation for some function of the human mind, he can only allege a vague kind of universal intuition. How do we understand the principles of mathematics? "You can't explain it. You understand it by an internal, mathematical reasoning, ou've got it or you haven't." What distinguishes the identical Neo-Spanish languages from each other? "It's an ineffable something... No rule can be given. You must have a flair for it, that's all." How, finally, does it happen that ordinary people are able...
After such flounderings he is always glad to return to safe ground, to his "lesson," a petty combination of pedantry and sadism, punctuated by grotesque poetry such as that of his discourses on phonetics. Ionesco forces us to see the professor and his lesson as the pupil herself doubtless sees them, uncomprehending. The ridicule is so successful that the girl's inability--and unwillingness--to think emerge as virtues by comparison...
...next to the professor, casual and happy, she presented a picture of slightly stupid innocence. As her torture increased so did the variety of her facial and bodily expressions of boredom, pain and outrage. Her delivery, like Montoya's, was nuanced and fluent. This is especially important in performing Ionesco, since most of the playwright's humor is based on his genius for distorting or exaggerating the phrases and rhymes of everyday conversation...