Hey there!
I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we’ll be discussing the
Theater of the Absurd.
Godot?
That’s your cue.
Godot?
It’s fine, plenty of time to wait for that guy: not a lot happens in these plays.
lights up, when you get around to it, I guess!
INTRO What is the Theater of the Absurd, and how
absurd is it?
Glad you asked!
Very!
Sometimes.
It’s a movement that got going in the 1950s, influenced by the events of forties.
Because, after you’ve come out of a world war in which millions of people were killed,
with atrocity after atrocity, and the world would never be the same, maybe light comedy
doesn’t really do it for you anymore.
The Theater of the Absurd wasn’t one of those moments where everyone hung out in bars
and had parties together.
And maybe that’s good, because some of those parties would have been… dour.
No, it was more of a loose style that a bunch of playwrights started writing in pretty much
independently.
And then, one day, critic Martin Esslin noticed and wrote an essay about it, and—bam!—a
movement was born.
Or identified.
Or whatever.
The Theater of the Absurd is another style that rejects realism.
Absurdism, like Dadaism and Surrealism, is predicted on the idea that life doesn’t
really make sense.
So theater shouldn’t make sense either.
This isn’t absurd like comedy-in-2018, more of a deeply dissatisfied, questioning kind
of absurd.
Plots are disordered.
Nothing happens, or if stuff does happen, it’s unmotivated.
Words don’t make meaning in the usual way, and characters aren’t consistent.
Mysteries don’t get solved, and order doesn’t get restored.
… LOL Philosophically, the worldview of the Theater
of the Absurd is similar to existentialism, probably because Esslin was
influenced by Albert Camus.
In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus wrote:
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.
But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels
an alien, a stranger.
His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of
a promised land.
This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling
of absurdity.”
… LOL Esslin thought that the Theater of the Absurd
could help its audience to accept life as meaningless and maybe not be so depressed
about this.
He wrote: “It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery
and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there
are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone
in a meaningless world.
The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind
it a sense of freedom and relief.
And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair
but the laughter of liberation.”
… … LOL?
There are a lot of playwrights who get labeled absurdist, including Alfred Jarry, Guillaume
Apollinaire, and also the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, king of the it-happened-like-this-no-it-happened-like-that-nope-I’m-never-gonna-understand-this-because-the-world-is-fundamentally-unknowable
play.
We’re going to look at three other absurdist playwrights today, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco,
and Samuel Beckett.
Jean Genet was born in France in 1910 and was abandoned soon after.
As a kid, he tried to run away a lot, and he often stole.
When he was fifteen, he was sent to French juvie.
When he turned eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion, but he was drummed out for
being gay.
He wandered around for a while, supporting himself with prostitution and petty theft.
He was in and out of prison, and it was in prison that he began to write, completing
an experimental novel, “Our Lady of the Flowers,” in 1944.
Genet became popular with the French intellectual crowd.
So when he was threatened with life imprisonment in 1949 for more theft, those intellectuals
came together to petition the government to free him.
And the government said okay.
Philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre was such a fan that he wrote a seven hundred-page
analysis of his life and work called “Saint Genet.”
When Genet turned to the theater, first with the short play “Deathwatch,” he established
the themes that would fascinate him for years: sex, power, beauty, degradation, ritual, and
theatricality itself.
Most of the characters in Genet’s plays are consciously playing roles that can suddenly
be reversed.
And with a shift in power dynamics comes a shift in sexual dynamics.
Reality often shifts, too, which gives the plays a disturbing, decentering quality.
You can see this in “The Balcony,” which is set in a brothel that caters to sexual
role play, and in “The Blacks,” in which a cast of
black actors perform in white face.
Genet died in Paris in 1986.
Let’s take a closer look at Genet’s work by dusting off his three-character 1947 drama,
“The Maids.”
Grab a mop, ThoughtBubble: “The Maids” begins with a scene between
a mistress and her maid, Claire.
Their relationship isn’t great.
Madame insults Claire, and Claire bullies Madame, forcing her to wear a red dress.
Claire spits at her.
Then an alarm clock goes off, startling both women.
We realize that “Madame” is actually the maid Claire, and “Claire” is her sister
Solange, and that this is an elaborate psychosexual game they play, taking turns as Madame.
As they wait for Madame, the phone rings.
It’s Monsieur, Madame’s lover.
He’s been in prison, mostly because of an anonymous letter the maids sent.
Now he is out on bail.
Bad news for the maids.
They’re afraid he’ll recognize their handwriting.
They’re frightened, and also they’re disgusted by their own poverty and servitude.
As Solange says, “I want to help you.
I want to comfort you, but I know I disgust you.
I'm repulsive to you.
And I know it because—you disgust me.
When slaves love one another, it's not love.”
Claire replies, “And me, I'm sick of seeing my image thrown back at me by a mirror, like
a bad smell: You’re my bad smell.”
So out of revenge and disgust, and in a not very sane attempt at self-preservation, Claire
decides to murder Madame.
Madame returns, and Claire puts sleeping pills into her tea.
But before she can drink it, Solange tells her that Monsieur is free, and Madame leaves
the tea untouched.
The maids begin their game again, but this time it’s darker, crueler, and even weirder.
Claire is playing Madame.
She orders Solange to bring her a cup of tea.
Claire lies down on Madame’s bed and drinks the poisoned tea, killing herself.
Thanks, ThoughtBubble.
That was not hygienic.
While Genet based his play on an actual real-life French murder, Genet was obviously not trying
to create true crime or realism.
Genet’s pal Sartre suggested that adolescent boys should play all the roles as a way to
enhance the unreality.
But with its gowns, flowers, and sadomasochistic humiliation, it’s already pretty unreal.
Our next absurdist is Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco, author of deceptively simple,
sometimes allegorical works like “The Chairs” or “Rhinoceros.”
Ionesco was born in Romania in 1909 and moved between Romania and France several times.
When Ionesco was almost forty, he decided to learn English by memorizing simple sentences.
Those sentences made their way into an absurdist and sometimes silly work called “The Bald
Soprano.”
In this play, one nice couple, the Smiths, invite over another nice couple, the Martins.
The Martins think they are strangers to each other and then discover they’ve been married
for years.
Here’s an excerpt: MRS.
MARTIN: Bazaar, Balzac, bazooka!
MR.
MARTIN: Bizarre, beaux-arts, brassieres!
MRS.
SMITH: a,e,i,o,u, a,e,i,o,u, a,e,i,o,u, i!….
MRS.
SMITH: Choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo!
The director wasn’t really sure how to stage it, and initially the play was a flop.
But other writers and intellectuals championed it—yay, intellectuals!—and Ionesco kept
going.
Ionesco was influenced by Dada and the Surrealists, and a lot of his work is about a desire to
access some other, better, probably unreachable world.
He’s best known for a cycle of plays centered on a naïve everyman figure called Bérenger
who pops up in different times and situations.
These plays are “The Killer,” “Rhinoceros,” “Exit the King,” and “A Stroll in the
Air.”
Some of these plays have a more political orientation, but some don’t.
Bérenger is always struggling with the problem of human endeavor and free will in a seemingly
random universe.
Ionesco’s plays are written in simple, sometimes even simplistic language.
But that disguises serious preoccupations and serious despair.
Because, y’know, randomness, entropy, death.
Ionesco died in France in 1994.
And this here is your friend and mine, Samuel Beckett.
Is Beckett the greatest modernist playwright?
Yes.
I’m sorry, that’s just a fact.
His plays are weird and funny and horrifying and deeply moving.
Just when you think you’ve got one of his plays nailed, the meanings have a way of sliding
out from under you.
We’re big fans.
Beckett was born in Ireland in 1906.
After university, he moved to France to teach, where he eventually became the research assistant
of James Joyce.
Beckett wrote poems, novels, and short stories.
Also all great.
And like Genet, he was at one point stabbed by a pimp.
He also drove Andre the Giant to school on occasion!
True story.
During World War Two, Beckett was active in the Resistance.
And after the war, he began his career as a playwright, typically writing in French.
His best-known play is “Waiting for Godot,” a bleak tragicomedy from 1948 about two tramps
waiting for a man who—spoiler alert—never arrives.
One critic called it a play in which nothing happens.
Twice.
It’s part vaudeville and part philosophy, and honestly - it’s pretty awesome.
I mean, it’s made fun of as a quintessentially weird, modern play for a lot of good reasons…
but it is ALSO a good play.
Other notable Beckett plays include “Endgame,” “Happy Days,” “Krapp’s Last Tape,”
and “Play,” because there were no titles left, I guess.
Beckett’s plays are almost completely empty of action.
The characters are barely there.
The dialogue goes in circles.
Every rule Aristotle ever wrote, Beckett breaks except for unity of place.
And as we all know, Aristotle never even wrote that one!
Are Beckett’s plays realistic?
Nooo.
So why are his plays so great?
They are about people trying to live in a world that doesn’t make any sense.
And that’s, I mean, that’s most of us.
They are bleak.
But they’re also very funny and perversely humane.
Even in a senseless world, we still have each other.
Beckett died in 1989, and, well … Nothing to be done.
Am I?
Me too.
No.
Not now, not now - there’s work yet to be done!
Thanks for watching.
We’ll see you next time when we take a break from all of this existential despair and the
search for meaning in a seemingly random universe.
Grab your Playbills and start stalking the stage door, because Crash
Course Theater is going to Broadway, baby!
Oh wait.
Yorick says that existential despair is there, too.
Aaargh.
Caftan, curtsy, cup-o-noodles…
Curtain!