Theatre of the Absurd Lecture

Theatre of the Absurd Lecture

• INTRODUCTION
  1. Emerged in Europe and the United States after World War II. It was a time where people were discouraged with the unjustness of the world.
  2. Penned by critic Martin Esslin.
  3. Esslin got the name “Theatre of the Absurd” from Albert Camus’ philosophical book The Myth of Sisphus. In it, Camus states that there is a separation between “man and his life, the actor and his setting,” and that this separation “constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.”
  4. Plays falling into this category of absurdism convey humanity’s sense of alienation and its loss of bearings in an illogical, unjust, and ridiculous world.
  5. Although serious, the plays can be quite comical…with much irony.

 

• PLOTS: ILLOGICALITY
  1. Traditional plots in plays proceed in a logical way from a beginning, through a development, to the end. Everything is in order…not plays labeled as theatre of the absurd.
  2. Plays can break all the major rules. Titles can have nothing to do with the actual play itself. Triggers can be presented with no heap; action can begin and then forgotten. The plots can be ridiculous and unbelievable. In Ionesco’s Amedee, a long-dead corpse in an adjoining room continues to grow during the course of the play and finally crashes through the wall of the apartment onstage.
  3. Read example from Albee’s The American Dream on pg. 296 of The Theatre Experience by Wilson.

 

• LANGUAGE: NONSENSE
  1. “Non sequitur is a Latin term meaning “it does not follow”, it implies that something does not follow from what has gone before.
  2. Sentences do not follow in sequence, and words do not mean what we expect them to mean.
  3. Read example from Lucky’s speech in Waiting For Godot 45.
  4. Incoherent and jargon fill the absurdist play.

 

• CHARACTERS: EXISTENIAL BEINGS
  1. Characters have an element of the ridiculous within their actions.
  2. Frequently exemplify as existential point of view toward human behavior.

 

• EXISTENTIALISM
  1. An existential viewpoint is one in which a person creates himself in the process of living, and through that, each person must decide which laws to obey and which to defy and that private conscience should determine choice and action. Truth is unknowable.
  2. Got attention through a philosopher, novelist, and dramatist named Jean-Paul Sartre. Sarte denied the existence of God, bought into a fixed standards of conduct and verifiable moral codes. People must choose their own values and live by them, for “man is only what he does. Man becomes what he chooses to be.” Sarte used the atrocities of the holocaust as an example of what conformism can do: people will just go along with what everyone else is doing (like the Germans).
  3. Camus denied being an existentialist and often was at odds with Sarte. But between these two they supplied the philosophical basis for the absurdist movement in the early 1950s. People thought there ideas of man against the world were romantic.
  4. An existential viewpoint in drama is where characters have no personal history and therefore no specific causes for their actions. There is no cause and effect. There is no accountability since we are responsible for our own selves; we also cannot help what we do for we are who we are.
     1. In Waiting For Godot, we know nothing about the characters, their family life, their occupation, biography, etc. Therefore there is no exposition, another major structure piece missing from a standard play. We see characters for whom little or no explanation is given.
     2. Most of the places the plays take place in are symbolic, time is flexible, plots focus on a condition rather than telling a story.

 

• THE PLAYS
  1. Eugene Ionesco
     1. Rhinoceros
  2. Edward Albee
     1. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
     2. Three Tall Women
  3. Samuel Beckett
     1. Waiting For Godot

 

• PLAYWRIGHT BIOGRAPHIES
  1. Eugene Ionesco
     5. Born in Slatina, Romania on November 13, 1909, Eugène Ionesco grew up in France, but returned to Romania with his father after his parents divorced in 1925. He was Jewish but he never identified with it. He studied French Literature at the University of Bucharest from 1928 to 1933. In 1936, he married Rodica Burileanu. He and Rodica had one daughter for whom he wrote several unconventional children’s stories. Ionesco and his family lived in Marseilles during World War II, then settled in Paris after its liberation in 1944.
     6. Ionesco did not write his first play until 1950. Having decided at the age of 40 that he ought to learn English, Ionesco acquired an English text and set to work, conscientiously copying whole sentences from his primer for the purpose of memorizing them. Rereading them attentively, he learned not English but some astonishing truths–that, for example, there are seven days in the week, something he already knew; that the floor is down, the ceiling up, things he already knew as well, perhaps, but that he had never seriously thought about or had forgotten, and that seemed to him, suddenly, as stupefying as they were indisputably true.

• As the lessons became more complex, two characters were introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. To Ionesco’s astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, English, like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. But then, as Ionesco would later write, “A strange phenomenon took place. I don’t know how–the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed. The clichés and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense … gave way to pseudo-clichés and pseudo-truisms; these disintegrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language disintegrated into disjointed fragments of words.”

1. Ionesco set about translating his experience into a play, The Bald Soprano, which was staged by Nicolas Bataille on May 11, 1950, at the Noctambules. The Bald Soprano went unnoticed, however, until a few established writers and critics (Jean Anouilh, Raymond Queneau, and Jacques Lemarchand) saw the play and supported it publicly. Their campaign to attract an audience for the play succeeded and the middle-aged Ionesco soon found himself in a position of international renown. He went on to write more than twenty plays including Rhinoceros, The Chairs, Jack or The Submission, The Lesson, The Killer, Exit the King, Macbett, and Journeys Among the Dead.
2. Ionesco rejected the logical plot, character development, and thought of traditional drama, instead creating his own anarchic form of comedy to convey the meaninglessness of modern man’s existence in a universe ruled by chance. His awards include the Tours Festival Prize for film, 1959; Prix Italia, 1963; Society of Authors theatre prize, 1966; Grand Prix National for theatre, 1969; Monaco Grand Prix, 1969; Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1970; Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and honorary doctorates from New York University and the universities of Louvain (France), Warwick (England), and Tel Aviv (Israel). He was elected into the Académie Française in 1970.

 

1. Edward Albee
   1. Was not the typical absurdist.
   2. Was the most critically acclaimed American dramatist of the 1960s.

• Born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, C., Edward Albee was adopted as an infant by Reed Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee, a powerful American Vaudeville producer. Brought up in an atmosphere of great affluence, he clashed early with the strong-minded Mrs. Albee who attempted to mold him into a respectable member of the Larchmont, New York social scene. But the young Albee refused to be bent to his mother’s will, choosing instead to associate with artists and intellectuals whom she found, at the very least, objectionable.

1. At the age of twenty, Albee moved to New York’s Greenwich Village where he involved himself in the gay night club scene-although he was closeted. He had held a variety of odd jobs including office boy, record salesman, and messenger for Western Union before finally hitting it big with his 1959 play, The Zoo Story. Originally produced in Berlin where it shared the bill with Samuel Beckett‘s Krapp’s Last Tape, The Zoo Story told the story of a drifter who acts out his own murder with the unwitting aid of an upper-middle-class editor. Along with other early works such as The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960), The Zoo Story effectively gave birth to American absurdist drama. Albee was hailed as the leader of a new theatrical movement and labeled as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. He is, however, probably more closely related to the likes of such European playwrights as Beckett and Harold Pinter. Although they may seem at first glance to be realistic, the surreal nature of Albee’s plays is never far from the surface. In A Delicate Balance (1966), for example, Harry and Edna carry a mysterious psychic plague into their best friends’ living room, and George and Martha’s child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) turns out to be nothing more than a figment of their combined imagination, a pawn invented for use in their twisted, psychological games. In Three Tall Women (1994), separate characters on stage in the first act turn out to be, in the second act, the same character at different stages of her life.
2. The messages in his stories remain unclear; the parables confusing. But all seem to imply that human beings have lost the ability to cope with their problems and anxieties because they refuse to accept responsibility for their lives and project responsibility onto others for their own or the world’s inadequacies.
3. He suffered through a bout of alcoholism and although he suffered through a decade of plays that refused to yield a commercial hit in the 1980’s, Albee experienced a stunning success with Three Tall Women (1994) which won him his third Pulitzer Prize as well as Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle. He had previously won Pulitzers for A Delicate Balance (1966) and Seascape (1975). Other awards include an Obie Award (1960) and a Tony Award (1964).

 

1. Samuel Beckett
   1. Was the first of the absurdists to win international fame with Waiting For Godot which in 1953 brought absurdism its first popular attention both in France and elsewhere.
   2. Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, “I had little talent for happiness.”

• Was raised a Protestant, but gave up religion to become an atheist.

1. Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation–it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up–but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce’s daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.
2. In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journeys, he no doubt came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these acquaintances would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.
3. Was stabbed by a vagrant asking for money in Paris in 1938 and suffered a perforated lung. He wanted to meet his attacker in prison to find out why.  When he asked him, the attacker said, “Je ne sais pas, Monsieur.” (“I do not know.”)  This phrase often was the sentiment of many of the characters in Beckett’s work.

• During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris–even after it had become occupied by the Germans. He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942 when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after it had been liberated from the Germans, he returned to Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five years that followed, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism.
• “Who Am I?” is a common theme in his plays.

1. His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone. In spite of some expectations to the contrary, the strange little play in which “nothing happens” became an instant success, running for four hundred performances at the Théâtre de Babylone and enjoying the critical praise of dramatists as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder, and William Saroyan who remarked, “It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre.” Perhaps the most famous production of Waiting for Godot, however, took place in 1957 when a company of actors from the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop presented the play at the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over fourteen hundred convicts. Surprisingly, the production was a great success. The prisoners understood as well as Vladimir and Estragon that life means waiting, killing time and clinging to the hope that relief may be just around the corner. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow.
2. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him “an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

• THE PLAYS’ SYNOPSIS
  1. Rhinoceros by Ionesco: Berenger – an average citizen in a nameless French city – is not interested in the fact that rhinoceros are on the loose. This causes him to quarrel with his friend Jean and his attractive secretary Daisy outside a grocer’s shop. The argument continues with many local joining in – these include the grocer and his wife, a waitress and a housewife, a cafe owner, an old gentleman, a waitress and a logician. The group try to reason the events that are happening around them. The results are understandably chaotic.  In the local government office where Berenger works he witnesses that the staff are gradually turning into rhinoceros. Eventually Berenger finds out that Daisy and he are the only human beings left. To his surprise Daisy then too turns into a rhinoceros. Berenger concludes he will then fight against all the rhinoceros.
  2. Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett: The plot of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is simple to relate. Two tramps are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of M. Godot. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. The play is a development of the title, Waiting for Godot. He does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world.
  3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee: George, a professor at a small college, and his wife, Martha, have just returned home, drunk from a Saturday night party. Martha announces, amidst general profanity, that she has invited a young couple an opportunistic new professor at the college and his shatteringly naïve new brideto stop by for a nightcap. When they arrive the charade begins. The drinks flow and suddenly inhibitions melt. It becomes clear that Martha is determined to seduce the young professor, and George couldn’t care less. But underneath the edgy banter, which is cross-fired between both couples, lurks an undercurrent of tragedy and despair. George and Martha’s inhuman bitterness toward one another is provoked by the enormous personal sadness that they have pledged to keep to themselves: a secret that has seemingly been the foundation for their relationship. In the end, the mystery in which the distressed George and Martha have taken refuge is exposed, once and for all revealing the degrading mess they have made of their lives.
  4. Three Tall Women by Edward Albee: In Act One, a young lawyer, “C,” has been sent to the home of a client, a ninety-two-year-old woman, “A,” to sort out her finances. “A,” frail, perhaps a bit senile, resists and is of no help to “C.” Along with “B,” the old woman’s matronly paid companion/caretaker, “C” tries to convince “A” that she must concentrate on the matters at hand. In “A’s” beautifully appointed bedroom, she prods, discusses and bickers with “B” and “C,” her captives. “A’s” long life is laid out for display, no holds barred. She cascades from regal and charming to vicious and wretched as she wonders about and remembers her life: her husband and their cold, passionless marriage; her son and their estrangement. How did she become this? Who is she? Finally, when recounting her most painful memory, she suffers a stroke. In Act Two, “A’s” comatose body lies in bed as “B” and “C” observe no changes in her condition. In a startling coup-de-theatre, “A” enters, very much alive and quite lucid. The three women are now the stages of “A’s” life: the imperious old woman, the regal matron and the young woman of twenty-six. Her life, memories and reminiscences pondered in the first act are now unceremoniously examined, questioned, accepted or not, but, at last, understood. In the end, her son arrives and kneels at her bedside, but it is too late.