Word: ionesco
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Instantly the entire statement has been made clear: there is no message. A lifetime's impressions cannot be neatly synopsized. And there is no audience: only hollow men, a worshiping wife, and a world of idiotically polite conservation. At the same time, Ionesco illustrates his own failure: the drama, to him, is an inadequate means of communication. The professional orator stands in the old man's way just as actors separate the playwright and his words (a fact of life Ionesco continually decries...
...Ionesco once revealed: "I try only to explain myself ...I have decided not to recognize any laws except those of my own imagination." It follows, since the great restriction of our time (as Ionesco sees it) is dogma, that the writer must declare his freedom from the ideological discipline most vociferously. And when he concludes that there is no Message, he does so with pride rather than despair. The process by which Ionesco's heroes are forced into aloneness by an encroaching world is (ironically) a victorious and heroic one. Their solitude is the glorification of their individualism...
...Ionesco is the playwright of the man who stands alone contemplating the difficulty of human communication, Genet represents the man who has been kicked to the ground and lies screaming. Only it's not a man at all: it's a woman and a homoexual and a convict. For, like the Atheist of the joke who antagonizes his religious friends by saying: "Sure, I believe in an anthropomorphic God: she's a Negro," Genet warns that White Christian Civilization must face up to its outcasts...
Both Genet and Ionesco are admittedly ill at case with the dramatic illusion. So it is more than coincidental that both explore the possibilities of the play within the play, and make stringent demands on their actors. In The Chairs, Stanley Jay and Mary Alice Bayth do a superb job, turning emptiness into a tangible reality. Had this standard been sustained after intermission, much might have been done to put M. Genet's poetry into context and to make his fury more comprehensible. Sylvia Gassel, though, could not innoculate her long, apocalyptic soliloquies with meaning, and the audience lapsed from...
...price of two is what the Charles has to offer this months. Maybe the ticket girl can be cajoled into some deal where she admits those who swear to leave at intermission for half price. But the production of Ionesco should really not be bypassed; it's exciting theater...