Word: ionesco
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...Ionesco and Genet write for themselves. Almost incidentally they find an audience in the small intellectual cadre capable of identifying with their plights, and the bewildered, fashionable throng that will never challenge either the playwright's meaning or the Emperor's new clothes...
...Ionesco builds to a simple, visual metaphor. Sometimes he becomes too involved in his blueprint and loses sight of the overall structure (as in The New Tenant). The same is true of Rhinoceros, but the brilliance of the plan itself is staggering. In The Chairs, finally, production outline, technique, and final product are equally brilliant...
...room is filled with an illusory crowd peopling row upon row of real chairs. The nonagenarians are continually pushed back by the aisles of people/emptiness, until the man stands alone on what has become the stage of a vacant theater. As he else-where uses eggs or rhinoceroses, Ionesco here uses chairs to create a physical situation that dwarfs and isolates the individuals remaining on his stage...
COMEDY. Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary is a hilarious must, with Ionesco's Rhinoceros a provocative near-must. Come Blow Your Horn recommended for fanciers of Jewish family humor. An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May recommended for everyone, at least once, but preferably twice...
...hatred, is probably the most interesting item around. Genet's other long-running offering is The Balcony, an amusing charade in which the world is seen as a vast brothel. Rising Dramatist Edward Albee, who has not yet written a full-length play, has built a reputation on Ionesco-like one-acters, of which The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith are now on view. The classics are represented by an exciting and remarkably durable Hamlet at the Phoenix, and by Hedda Gabler, with Anne Meacham doing Ibsen to the hilt...