Students of the Fine Arts and Art History Department 283 section three class present an in-studio performance entitled "What on Earth is Going On?" directed by David Kuran in Bathish Auditorium.
Three highly absurd plays:
- They Alone Know (by J. Tardieu - 12 minutes)
- Come and Go (by S. Beckett - eight minutes)
- The Bald Soprano (by E. Ionesco - 38 minutes)
They Alone Know
What? A play with no exposition? That's the absurdity of this small piece. Otherwise the dialogue is super-conventional and the situations quite stock. So what is its appeal? The possibilities for bravura acting for one thing; one acting professor lectured his students not to scorn playing in soap opera because "it is so much fun to act in pure trash." Indeed it is a challenge to draw the audience into an unknown situation that stays unknown. For another thing; it takes clever writing to create such a script; Jean Tardieu - who has not much of a following outside of France-was "a writers' writer" - and admired by the newly emerging coterie of French asurdists.
Come and Go
Samuel Beckett - of "Waiting for Godot" fame-gives us here a short sample (eight minutes; 121 words) of his icy ambiguity. Pessimistic? Perhaps: but one cannot be even be completely sure of that. The silences do not easily give up their secrets. But they are interesting acting/viewing exercises.
At any rate, according to the Irish Broadcasting Co. this small play - with "its very elegant construction" - is one of Beckett's currently most performed pieces.
The Bald Soprano
Arguably the flagship of absurd theatre-it first started in 1953, predating Waiting for Godot: the play, according to its translator Donald Watson, was composed when the author tried to learn English and was struck by the absurdity of the phrases in his small Assimil English course book.
Assembling them into a play and getting it performed did not take nearly as long as gaining the recognition it now has as a classic of the absurd.
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