[Twenty-five years
ago, my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, attended a
talk by the great 20th-century playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909-94). As he usually did, Kirk made notes about the
experience and he’s used that contemporaneous account as the basis for this
article. Ionesco died six years after
the appearance at Columbia University, and the world lost one of the most
important figures of modern theater post-World War II, a founder of the
Theater of the Absurd, and a man of strong opinions. Kirk has a few opinions of his own, as
readers of ROT
will know by now, so he’s turned his interpretive powers back onto this unique
experience and shares with us the results of his consideration. I’m pleased to post those thoughts on ROT for you all to read. ~Rick]
On
Wednesday, June 15, 1988, the playwright Eugene Ionesco gave a talk at the
Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre at Columbia University, an event in the First New
York International Festival of the Arts. (The festival was held again at least
the following year, but as far as I can tell no longer continues, at any rate under
its original name.) The talk, I gather, is still fondly and enthusiastically
remembered by those who were lucky enough to be there, and I was one of them.
Afterwards
I wrote my friend Steve Johnson:
A report, hot off the
presses, on a real Cultural event. This is the month (?) of the New York
International Festival of the Arts (I think it’s called). I happened to see in
the paper that one of the first events was a lecture by Ionesco on the topic “Who
Needs Theater, Anyway?,” at Columbia, and I went, and having gone I don’t
really feel the need to attend any more events. I can only soak up so much
greatness . . . .
The
plays of Eugene Ionesco (he was born in 1909 and died in 1994) have passed
through three distinct phases of criticism. In the first, in the 1950s and
1960s, he was lionized as one of the leaders, with Samuel Beckett, Arthur
Adamov, and Jean Genet, of what Martin Esslin described in his landmark 1961
critical study as The Theatre of the Absurd.
Many of Ionesco’s most famous plays were written at that time, including his
early one-acts such as The Bald Soprano (running
in Paris since 1952),The Lesson, and The Chairs.
The
second phase began sometime in the 1960s and coincided with Ionesco’s beginning
to write full length plays. In this phase, despite his association with
avant-garde theater, he began to be considered somewhat old-hat. Many people
were now writing “Ionesco plays,” so he no longer startled. Another factor may
have been that his longer plays were not as concise as his shorter. This
comment may sound self-evident but no one wants a restless audience, and there
was a feeling in theatrical circles that the long form was not his strength. In
any case, he began to be taken for granted, a process that accelerated over the
next decades. His plays were still performed but he was no longer looked to as
a leader of the theater.
The
third phase has been gaining momentum for a while: Ionesco is now recognized as
a worthwhile playwright, not having to be associated with a “school” of
playwriting to justify his importance. At least two of his long plays seem
solidly established today. Exit the King
(1962) was produced in a stunning and critically acclaimed production on
Broadway in 2009, with Geoffrey Rush winning a Tony Award as King Berenger, and
Rhinoceros is frequently performed –
it was recently discussed by Rick in this blog (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/10/rhinoceros.html).
I
predict that this third phase will continue, and that his later plays, such as Hunger and Thirst (1966), on the subject
of religion, and the very entertaining A
Stroll in the Air (1963), will be increasingly performed, partly because
there are not all that many good plays around, partly because Ionesco is not at
all a “difficult” playwright; on the contrary, his plays are accessible and in
many ways classic in content if not in form. (It is appropriate, in this sense,
that he was made a member of the Académie française in 1970.)
I first realized
how accessible Ionesco’s plays are when a friend, in college, told me he had
just read the one-act play The Chairs and had no idea what it was all
about. I’d never thought about it, but it was easy to ask, “What are they doing
in the play?” “They’re setting up for a speech.” “And what happens?” “No one
comes.” “Well then, it’s probably about difficulties of communication.” My
friend was relieved and pleased, but also at the same time a little deflated,
as though somebody had just explained a magic trick to him.
To generalize
slightly, we – especially those of us trained in college literature classes –
tend to focus on what a work of art is “about,” as though each art work comes
with a special secret key, and as though when we find that key and use it, we’ll
discover something astonishing that no one has ever thought of before. Surely
we should have learned by now not to expect the unthought-of? William Goldman, in
his delightful book The Season, writes about Harold Pinter:
And The Birthday Party, if you really want to know what it’s about, is about this: there is no
hiding place. Does that make it a better play? Does that make the two hours any
more pleasant while you’re sitting there? Pinter is also saying, “There is no
God.” Or maybe he isn’t. But in either case, it’s pretty cornball, right?
Examine any art work down to the bone and you find cliché. That’s one of the
things that’s so painful about graduate school. You take some pretty poem, some
poem that really moves you, and you examine it and pore over its imagery and
decipher the philosophy, and what do you come up with? Keats is saying, “Love
thy neighbor.”
Ionesco, it seems,
when pressed to talk about what his plays “mean,” embraced the idea of the
Absurd, maybe even a bit much to take without a grain of salt – he surely knew
that was what his listeners wanted to hear. In an article in The New York Times the day Ionesco gave his talk at Columbia, Mervyn Rothstein quoted the
playwright as saying:
“Theater doesn’t exist at the
moment,” he said, through a translator, in his suite at a midtown hotel. “It’s
bad everywhere. Between 1950 and 1960 it was good. Beckett, Genet, Adamov, moi. It was theater
where you posed a problem, the most important problem of all: the problem of
the existential condition of man – his despair, the tragedy of his destiny, the
ridiculousness of his destiny, the absurdity of his destiny. Another
interesting problem is the existence of a God, a divinity, as Beckett writes
about in ‘Waiting for Godot.’ Man without God, without the metaphysical,
without transcendence, is lost.”
. . . .
“I will tell you a story from Kafka. Men wanted to
construct a tower to climb to God. But when they reached the third floor they
started to disagree about how to build it, and they completely forgot God. So
God got angry, and smashed the tower with His fist. The people were scattered
through all parts of the world, speaking different languages, and they have
never understood each other since. It’s been that way for tens of thousands of
years. Therefore I find the disintegration of language tragic. When I wrote ‘The
Bald Soprano,’ I laughed as I made the language fall apart. But I laugh no
longer.”
“Let me recall some words from Dostoyevsky, from ‘The
Idiot,’“ Mr. Ionesco said. “‘Why do you not love yourself? Why do you love
money? Why do you not embrace each other? That would be so simple.’“
It may
be fair to say that Ionesco’s thought is profound but not surprising. Why,
then, be interested in him at all? The answer, I would say, is: because of the
verve, the delight, the excitement he conveys. Those are the same qualities
that he demonstrated in his talk at Columbia, qualities that made the morning
unforgettable.
I tried
to capture the experience in my letter:
It was an interesting
experience from top to bottom. Levels. First of all there was the audience,
mostly young, all enthusiastic, many there a long time before the door opened
so they could try for tickets. I was thinking, What kind of show will this be?
Lasers? How funny [I imagined] – just to hear someone read a speech, probably
not that much different from the things he’s written, or for that matter from
the article in the Times this
morning.
Anyway, on another
level, there was Ionesco the celebrity coming out on stage with all the flash
attachments going off, and the fulsome introduction linking him with all the
great names of drama of the past that come to mind.
(As I
recall, I am not exaggerating; the introduction for Ionesco couldn’t have been
more fulsome if he had been described as an amalgam of Homer, Shakespeare, and
all the extant Greek dramatists, both tragic and comedic. I remember wondering
how Ionesco was taking this extravagant praise. My recollection is that he was impassive.)
And then Ionesco, the
actual person up there on stage, a tiny, frail man with features so sunken that
he looked, when not talking, like an oriental clown. And then Ionesco the guru,
because he spoke in French with an interpreter (a drama critic!), so those of us
who don’t know much French were listening to the voice speaking incomprehensible
things, straining to pick up a hint of meaning as the Swami droned on . . . om
om om om . . . you know what I mean.
It
strikes me now, but didn’t then, that this experience, which I remember
vividly, is a perfect “Ionesco situation” – the exaggerated importance of the
event, the crowds waiting for the word from the Great One, the communication
that goes nowhere. I hope Ionesco appreciated the irony.
And then Ionesco the
professional, academic, and playwright, who knows quite well how to handle
himself in this situation, thank you, and who has an impassioned way of
speaking, whimsical eyes, and extremely expressive hands. And the fans in the
audience, who would cheer when he would get off a particularly good one about
the human condition . . .
The Times article has a photograph of a
droll Ionesco, tiny, with an enormous forehead, seated looking at the camera,
languidly staring straight ahead with his chin on his hand. A natural comedian,
I’d have said, if I’d had no more evidence than the photograph. Rothstein
writes, “He is now ‘75, 76 years old, maybe a little less, maybe a little more,’
and he walks with a cane, but the diminutive Romanian-born French playwright –
he settled in Paris in 1938 – has lost none of his fire, or his playful humor,
in defending his kind of theater.” He continues:
Mr. Ionesco has long
criticized the American realistic, or naturalistic, theater as naïve and
simple-minded. “Realism does not exist,” he said. “Everything is invention.
Even realism is invented. Reality is not realistic. It’s another school of
theater, a style.”
He paused and smiled.
“What is real, after all? Ask one of the most important geniuses of science,
physics or mathematics. He will not be able to give a definition of real. The
only reality is that which comes from inside – the unconscious, the irrational,
our thoughts, images, symbols. They are all truer than the truth, than realism.”
Ionesco
makes these points in more detail in articles and interviews collected in Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the
Theatre (Grove Press, 1964). Particularly notable is his back-and-forth
with the critic Kenneth Tynan, who took the point of view of what Ionesco describes
as “realism.” Both make good points; neither gets very far, because both their
arguments are about style, not substance. Tynan wants Ionesco to engage with
the “real world;” Ionesco is engaged
with the real world, to the point where some of his plays seem almost too
obviously “political” – not in the sense of endorsing one party or another, but
as critiques of the way the world operates. (Rhinoceros has received both blame and praise for this reason.)
An odd
personal incident at the time illustrated this blend of the public and the
imaginative. In my letter I write:
A week or so ago I
had an experience that made me see all this from a different angle. We have
numerous analysts and programmers at Time [Inc., where I worked then] who came
from behind the Iron Curtain, and I mentioned to a Romanian friend that I was
going to be seeing a compatriot [of hers], Ionesco. Oh yes, she said, she knew
him, and knew his daughter quite well. The daughter is active in a sort of
Romanian Association of Arts and Letters in exile [the Communist regime was in
power at that time], and Ionesco had spent time with them at their annual
meeting last year, in Paris. I thought, small world, and especially for exiles!
And
what was it like to hear Ionesco talk? I wrote in my letter, “The title
question [Who Needs Theater Anymore?] remains unanswered.” In the Times
article, though, Ionesco is quoted as answering:
“Tout
le monde. People
have needed the theater for thousands of years,” he said. “There’s no reason
for this to change.”
But why do they need
theater?
“For nothing,” he
said. “The theater is useless, but its uselessness is indispensable. Why do
people need football? What purpose is there?
And even though there
is no good theater now, he says, there will be a renaissance. “It will come
necessarily” he said. “Because it must. Because theater is a pure necessity of
man.”
But isn’t it useless?
“In appearance it
seems unnecessary,” he said. “But uselessness and superfluousness are things
that are necessary.”
Continuing
my account of the speech:
After suggesting that
the theater was indispensable because it was so primitive, so basic, he went
into a description (for “the younger ones, who may never have heard of it”!) of
the Theater of the Absurd, a name he said he wasn’t really comfortable with, although
since it referred to a specific time and group of writers, it was [to that
extent] useful.
If the Absurd means
anything, he said, it means thinking
about the absurd [italics mine], not some sort of static principle.
He restated his
belief that the only significant human contributions came from “the irrational,
the unconscious.” Pirandello, for example, he said, had “ideologies” of psychology
which limited him, but his plays are still worth watching because his
characters come from far deeper than any theory. (Beckett’s plays, he said in a
brilliant phrase, “border reality.”)
He also expressed
what many of us found a surprising interest in religion – again, as a project,
not a Thing – and in what is happening to the environment.
The really valuable
human activities, he said, are art (of the sort he champions), contemplation,
and prayer!
In the question and
answer period, someone asked if, since he had mentioned “the sacred” as an area
worth our attention, some day there might not be a theater of the sacred which
also used music and dance (he had said earlier that these were the only living
arts at the moment, and the Times
says he’s currently writing a libretto for an opera). “It’s what I live for,”
he said, “but I suspect that, with the ozone layer and the atom bomb, we won’t
last that long.”
The
opera is Maximilien Kolbe (1988),
with music by Dominique Probst, about a priest in the Holocaust who gives his
life to save another prisoner. It has received a number of productions.
He was always droll,
and often funny. [In the question and answer period] an actress said she was in
an acting school which taught a realistic method, and what did he advise? “GET
WELL QUICK!” he said [in English, as I remember it] – “detoxify yourself!”
My last
memory is of Ionesco, at the end of his talk, leaving the room, and his wife, a
woman even smaller than he was, scurrying after him, ready to protect him from
anyone who might bother him. Years ago, I recall reading, someone spotted
Ionesco in a Paris movie theater one night, making what the writer said was a
typical Parisian picture – sitting with one arm around his wife, the other
holding a popsicle.
From
his talk:
Those who are to be
pitied are those who spend their time in politics, in entertainment, in
business, instead of kneeling before the incomprehensible.
[I have only one
Ionesco anecdote of my own; I’ve related it on ROT
at least once already, but it’s too apt
not to repeat on this occasion. It
happened one evening as I was walking my dog preparatory to going uptown to the
theater. As I was returning to my
apartment, a pack of youngsters passed me on my block. They looked like high
school students, but I suppose it was college. Anyway, just as they walked
by me, one young man in the center of the group asked loudly, “What do you know
about Ionesco?” A little fellow in front—he really did look like he hadn’t
graduated from high school yet—spun around and declared, “Ionesco? I love
Ionesco!” At that moment, he backed right into a woman making her own way
down the sidewalk. If this had been a scene from a Beckett play, they'd all
have fallen into a heap on the pavement. But they didn't. Just a
brief pinball effect.]
In Kirk's profile of Eugene Ionesco above, he mentions in passing that I've posted a report on a production of the playwright's 'Rhinoceros.' As it happens, I wrote earlier reports, before I started ROT, on three of Ionesco's one-acts, 'The Bald Soprano,' 'The Lesson,' and 'The Chairs.' I've posted those 2004 reports, to be published as "Three Ionesco Plays (2004)" on 17 July. Check it out.
ReplyDelete~Rick