Word: ionesco
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...mounted to a ferver pitch as the man drew nearer, until the surging mass of the people gave way to utter hysteria. Rougemont felt something uncontrollable stir within him--the thrill of mass hysteria--and so powerful was the feeling that he almost succumbed. But something withing him rebelled. Ionesco relates Rougemont's story with curiosity in his notes from November 1960; "just then it was not his mind that resisted, not arguments formulated in his brain, but his whole being, his whole personality that bridled." Fascinated by the singularity of Rougemont's experience, Ionesco determined to write about this...
Theater: Eugene Ionesco transformed theater...
...peak in the early 1960s, Ionesco attracted such collaborators as Jean-Louis Barrault, who magically staged A Stroll in the Air; Laurence Olivier and Zero Mostel, who both played the lead in Rhinoceros (with Mostel winning a Tony Award on Broadway); and Alec Guinness, who starred in Exit the King, a Lear-like portrait of the inevitability of death. Ionesco was hailed as someone who might bridge the gap between literature and entertainment. Instead, his work grew more remote and austere, and his audiences dwindled. His last play, Journeys Among the Dead, was withdrawn before opening in New York City...
...Ionesco's work was often likened to Samuel Beckett's. In The Chairs, for example, an old couple at a lighthouse fill a room with chairs to prepare for an orator who turns out to speak only by growling. Most of Ionesco's works were funnier than Beckett's, more verbal, richer in farcical action and far less despairing. In Soprano, mock-philosophical discussion shaded into nonsense. The Lesson, a portrait of a megalomaniacal teacher, reflected dark satire of the powerful. Rhinoceros blended those themes with a manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast...
While America gave Rhinoceros its warmest reception anywhere, critics and audiences seemed to misunderstand it as light comedy. To Ionesco, it was a brutal metaphor for what happened in Romania under fascism and communism. In a journal dated "around 1940," he wrote, "The police are rhinoceroses. The judges are rhinoceroses. You are the only man among the rhinoceroses. The rhinoceroses wonder how the world could have been led by men. You yourself wonder: Is it true that the world was led by men?" The horror behind this question never left. Ionesco's jokes were those of nearly all the 20th...