| Course Description |
The theater of the absurd is perhaps the single most influential movement in modern
drama and theatre, important not only for launching the careers of playwrights like
Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, but also for its embrace of philosophers such as
Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and the manifestos of Antonin Artaud. In the
so-called “little theaters” of Paris in the late 1940s and ‘50s, plays such as Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano challenged the conventions of both
classical and bourgeois theater, staging a darkly humorous, “absurd” vision of human
existence. Through close readings and occasional screenings of the major plays
associated with this theater–often considered a type of anti-theater–we will identify the
primary themes of absurdist drama (purposelessness and hopelessness of human
existence; godlessness of the modern world; futility of action; collapse of logic;
impossibility of communication etc) as well as the hallmarks of the absurdist theatrical
style (its debt to mime, vaudeville, the circus, and marionette theater; the use of parody,
humor, ritual, and violence; theater within theater; absence of action/plot etc). We will
consider the philosophical and literary origins of this form of theater, especially its links
to the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; the social and political
factors contributing to its emergence in post-WWII Paris; theatrical conventions of early
performances; popular and critical reception of its early productions; precursors to the
theater of the absurd (Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics; Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty; the
indirect influence of Kafka, Italian Futurism, and Russian theater); and finally its influence on theater outside of France, particularly in England (Harold Pinter) and the
U.S. (Edward Albee, Maria Irene Fornes).
Some issues to which I would like us to be especially attentive are: the role of women
on stage; gender construction; performance techniques; the role of language (the main
writers of absurdist drama acquired French as a second language--Adamov was
Russian, Ionesco was Franco-Romanian, Beckett was Irish).
We will try to go together to see at least one absurdist or absurdist-influenced play in
New York.
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