The Bald Soprano and Other Plays

I sort of grew up with Ionesco. This crazy Romanian turned Frenchman with his absurd stage plays, the Bald Soprano and stuff like that, was synonym for art trash in yahoo speak. He wrote like abstract painters painted. Good honest citizens detested that kind of stuff and complained when theatres and museums who were subsidized by public funds played or diplayed it. Ionesco was the equivalent of Picasso in my home town red neck cultural perspective. (Please note that I am German, not Kentuckian. Apologies to Kentucky, should I have said Oklahoma? Anyway, German backwoods are no different.) Then I take a big leap with the time machine. No encounters with Ionesco since maybe the 60s. Plenty with Picasso though, who became one of my heroes (and one of my favorite writers, P. O'Brian, wrote a good biography, which I reviewed here, but I pulled the review out since nobody was interested). And now my daughter, who is doing her IB with drama as elective subject, chose The Lesson for her graduation stage production. I read it first and told her she is crazy. Nobody can play this mad professor who kills his private students after endless absurd monologues on philology (which leads to calamity, as the maid says). As any self-respecting 18 year old would, she ignored my ignorant advice and did it anyway. She found a fantastic actress to do the mad old professor, a 16 year old American Chinese girl who must have been born for this part. And perfect fits for the pupil and the maid as well. I have not had so much fun in a theatre for a long time. Hail to old Ionesco! And kudos to the producer and director of the play on this day!

As history tells us, the Frenchman Eugene Ionesco was learning English in the late 1940s when he was struck by the arbitrary nature of the sentences used to teach foreign language. ("I have a dog. His name is Spot. My name is Duncan.") Their nihilism and nonsensicality became the basis for his first play, La cantatrice chauve -- The Bald Soprano. People mostly love it or hate it; I love it. "Experience teaches us that when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is never anyone there." This is definitely fun. Of Ionesco, I will always say: Worth a read.

This book, being one of Ionesco's greatest, is without a doubt the epitome of the Theatre of the Absurd. I read this in a college french class of mine a few years ago and loved it. One warning for those who are unaccustomed to the tenets of this genre: this book does not make sense to the normal mind! nor does it intend to. The lesson this book teaches us is about the extent to which we take our language, and the reality behind it. Ionesco shows us, with alarming ease, that our language as we know it is useless, and ends up leading us in nothing but circles. Futility is a very crucial theme for this type of literature, and it is expressed by Ionesco wonderfully. If you'd like to try something with "a little more to it" , so to speak, Jean-Paul Sartre is a good place to start. Enjoy this book, this genre, and the lessons they provide.

I am directing the Bald Soprano soon. One of my major battles has been this: How do I translate Ionesco's ideas to my audience. Ionesco did not write his seemingly meaningless text to be a funny piece of sensless fluff. Ionesco saw in his work a profound meaning with deep implications. He shows us six people, whose interactions with each other are completely absurd and meaningless. The characters speak to each other in endless non-sequinters and cliches. They cannot communicate with one another. Their inablity to communicate unltimatally leads to conflict and the end, not only of the play, but of the lives of these characters (made alive only as long as the play lasts) the audience laughs at this. They look at these characters on the stage and think, "What aweful people they are." What they don't realize is that they are laughing at themselves. It is infact they who scurry about the earth speaking to one another with meaningless words, and in cliches. They are trapped in a world of political correctness, and useless sayings. They don't communicate, but say only what they are expected to say. They fight about things that have no eternal significance, and they fight until it is impossible for either side to win. The Bald Soprano shows us ourselves. The tragedy of the Bald Soprano is that we laugh at it, because we except that our relationships and indeed our existance is laughable. The tragedy is that we don't even know that we are laughing at ourselves, because we are blind to our own faults. WE don't allow ourselves to see that we are talking without speaking, and fighting without winning. The difficulty to the director is: How do we make the audience see Ionesco's point. If we made it completely obvious, than it would lose it's comic value, for who could laugh if they knew how desperate their circumstance was. And if they don't laugh, than the play loses it's tragedy. It would be simple if Ionesco had given us some text at the end to wrap it up, and tell the audience the meaning. But Ionesco didn't see the need to. To him, it was not possible for humanity to change. Even if he had made the audience understand that the characters were showing them themselves, they would not have been willing to change. To IOnesco, the world was headed on a downward spiral, so we night as well laugh about it, even if it is at our own expense.