Theatre Intime serves up a double dose of absurdity with two Eugene Ionesco plays.
By: Stuart Duncan
Theater Intime presents The Bald Soprano, above, along with The Chairs, through April 16.
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Eugene Ionesco is generally acknowledged as the father of Theater of the Absurd. The genre began in Paris in the early 1950s, rolled around writers such as Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett, and continues to this day with Sam Shepard and, some would say, Christopher Durang. Theatre Intime, on the Princeton University campus, is serving a double dose of absurdity Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano (1950), and The Chairs, written two years later and perhaps his most approachable work.
Intime director Ben Mains has some surprises for you. He begins with The Chairs, seating the audience on the stage facing "the House" which, it turns out, will be the acting area for a pair of sophomores, Scott Elmegreen and Nicole Greenbaum. The script calls for a 95-year-old man and his 94-year-old wife, but the two skip any attempt at age, and with good reason. They dash up and down the aisles, climbing on the seat backs, all the time introducing us to and speaking to invisible characters who show up to fill the area. The action reaches a fever pitch and it’s all great fun a real tour de force for the performers capturing Ionesco’s intent beautifully.
The Bald Soprano is not so successful. Ionesco reportedly wrote it as he was learning English (he already spoke his native Romanian and the language of his adopted country, France). He apparently was amused and somewhat nonplused by the phrases in his primer, which he described as empty platitudes, self-evident truisms. The play was first staged in Paris May 11, 1950, and although the cast felt it was a parody, it played better when handled seriously à la Ibsen.
Ionesco himself described The Bald Soprano as "anti-thematic, anti-ideological, anti-social-realist, anti-philosophical and anti-psychological." It has elements of burlesque, vaudeville, cabaret, commedia dell’arte, mime and clowning. The paragraph the playwright wrote to introduce his setting is instructive: "A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs, an English evening. Mr. Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire. He is wearing English spectacles and a small gray English mustache. Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs. Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence. The English clock strikes 17 English strokes."
But for this staging, director Mains has attempted not realism, but parody, and we already have seen how that turned out. His scene is decidedly cartoonish, bric-a-brac, including many clocks on the walls, no British accents, no pipe. The cast: Ted Hall, Liz Abernethy, Andy Hoover, Georgie Sherrington, Chris Berg and Uma Tadepalli, seems to be attempting to hit the comedy lines, albeit self-consciously, rather than allowing the audience to come to them as the fun strikes them. The ridiculousness of the language takes a decidedly second place to physical hi-jinks as the play unfolds.
Not all is lost you just never get the chance to see Ionesco these days and a flawed Bald Soprano is better than none at all. Besides, there is The Chairs and that should not be missed.
The Bald Soprano and The Chairs continues at Theatre Intime, Hamilton Murray Theater, Murray-Dodge Hall, Princeton University, through April 16. Performances: Thurs.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $12, $6 students. For information, call (609) 258-1742. On the Web: www.theatreintime.org