Word: lonesco
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...first read lonesco in the ninth grade. I particularly remember it because The Bald Soprano was the first piece of grown-up literature I ever got excited about. It is interesting that we should have gone beyond our pubescent skepticism to enthusiastically appreciate a play that strained even the breadth of adult tolerances. It certainly fit our attention spans much better than Dickens and, to be candid, we were not above its nihilism. But our liking for The Bald Soprano was not the product of our baser thirteen year old instincts. After a childhood of Dick and Jane and Landmark...
Humor was not just funny: it was seriously funny in those days. Tragedy was dean-everybody accepted that. But comedy was managing double duty, in plays like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, even Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Audiences laughed until quite literally they cried. In fiction, the selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece...
...Adamov, 61, Russian-born playwright of the absurd; by his own hand (an overdose of barbiturates); in Paris. As a young author, writing to expose his "anguish, masochism, perversions and preoccupations," Adamov turned out plays (La Parodie, 1947; L'Invasion, 1949) that earned him ranking with Beckett and lonesco as a founder of the theater of the absurd. His best-known work was 1955's Le Ping-Pong, an angry indictment of man's dehumanization by machines. "Life is not absurd," he finally admitted. "It is difficult, just very difficult...
...lonesco cannot sustain this elegant intensity at full stretch, though in the past he has done so. Where a play like Rhinoceros was intransigently original, as the imagery of The Triumph of Death cumulates, it becomes literary, reminiscent; often beautiful, it is eventually muffled in echo. Worse, satiric invention flags, seeks easy targets: political speakers who die, pompous doctors who die. At the end, the plague abates, but Death still waits, for the city and the few survivors are consumed by fire. An arbitrary close. But that's the point...
...lonesco is eloquent in his own defense, asserting in a program note that while Camus went to the plague to give moral and even political meaning to the absurd, he himself has the diametrical aim of taking meaning away. "Death is the ultimate threat . . . but in fact even those who think they know this, know it not." The Triumph of Death is a gaudy, funny feast of cynicism and imagery. It is unforgettable, but it is oddly without consequence. At its prodding, terror, mortal terror, twitches and rolls over but will not wake...