Single Scenes

SU Drama rises to the absurdistchallenges of staging two Ionesco one-acts

Whatever your reaction to seeing Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Chairs, two of the most discussed one-act plays of the last century, little performed in these parts, you can’t ignore a huge contradiction in their appearance. In his lifetime, Ionesco (1909-1994) likely never saw such classy production values as can be found during the current mountings presented by the Syracuse University Drama Department, even with all the chances he had to see The Bald Soprano, which opened in the 1950s and never closed. It is now completing 52 consecutive years, but it’s in Paris’ scruffy Theatre de la Huchette, not a patch on SU’s Storch Theatre inside the Syracuse Stage complex. 

Here’s the second contradiction. These short works that emerged from companies with no budgets, staged in back alleys, are now honored in academia, where students pay good money to learn how to perform them. Assuredly, Ionesco did not see respectability in his future.

Theater of the absurd has been around for nearly 60 years, but it is still not housebroken, thank heaven. Think of “absurd” as a nickname rather than an ideology because an American critic, Martin Esslin, thought it up without asking Ionesco or any of the others how they felt about it. In any case, Ionesco was his own man, a Rumanian immigrant who grew up hating the theater and did not start writing plays until he was in his late 30s. Once in France he was attracted to the brutal comedy of older Frenchmen like Alfred Jarry of Ubu Roi, an assault on middle-class decorum. In these early plays Ionesco also resembles Belgian painter Rene Magritte, in which a playful but seemingly nonsensical surface makes hash out of pedestrian attempts to explain them all. But it’s not too hard to see where he’s going.

The Bald Soprano (1950) and The Chairs (1952) might have been written only two years apart but they weren’t designed to run in tandem. Together, with intermission, they’re nearly three hours. Bald Soprano is a domestic farce, with disruptions like simulated sex behind a couch, in which there is frequent laughter. The Chairs is a bleak family drama about facing up to resisted truths. As one-line descriptions, of course, the same words could be applied to thousands of stage works, but they wouldn’t resemble these. So part of what makes these two run is that Ionesco is spoofing the genres he has inherited as well as the language in them.

The setting for The Bald Soprano is middle-class England, in part because it was Ionesco’s difficulty in learning English that inspired the play. We enter the comfortable home of the Smiths, which Sang Min Kim’s set makes a collision of the pretentious (hunting scenes, Gainsborough prints) and the garish (wallpaper only a Limey could love). Mrs. Smith (Kayla Levitt) wears crinolines and high heels around the house, like an upper bourgeois housewife in 1950s advertisements and sitcoms. She prates endlessly about something, as her husband, Mr. Smith (Tony Cavallo), barely notices. His mustachioed nose is buried behind The Times (before Rupert Murdoch dragged it into the mud), but wordless grunts suggest communication.

Another generically named couple arrives, Mr. Martin (Brad Koed) and Mrs. Martin (Kristin Morris). Instead of observing what’s before her, like a tourist in Disneyland, she whips out a vintage Instamatic camera and takes flash pictures before immediately moving on to the next subject. Mr. Martin thinks he may know Mrs. Martin from a previous encounter, but she says she can’t remember. They then run through a lengthy shaggy-dog dialogue about having come from the same distant city on the same train, live in the same house and sleep in the same bed. Does this mean they are husband and wife? Ionesco is borrowing a trick from logic class in which all circumstantial evidence can be reversed by small but crucial contradictions. They may sound absurd, but, hey, that’s the point.

Also in the household is the wiseacre maid, Mary (Jasmine Thomas), who initially looks like one of those Upstairs/Downstairs servants who knows more than the masters. Joining her is the heroic-seeming Fire Chief (Michael Owe), who is in fact Mary’s lover.

The idea that language does not communicate (one line of dialogue goes, “Cockatoo, cockatoo, cockatoo!”), so unsettling in 1950, has since gone mainstream in everything from Harold Pinter plays to the recent movie The Invention of Lying. Director Rodney Hudson gets more out of the dialogue by having performers deliver some of the rounded emotiveness of realistic drama instead of the marionette mechanics seen in other Ionesco productions. All the players achieve moments of hilarity, but Jasmine Thomas’ insinuating Mary and Kristin Morris’ lingering laughter as Mrs. Martin stick with you after the action is over.

In The Chairs Hudson has his two players, Old Man (Peter Hourihan Jr.) and Old Woman (Kelsey Stalter), speak in an even more realistic style as they are people with fully comprehensible emotions and dreads. It’s usually a thankless task to have college actors portray old people, but Hudson and company faced up to the problem immediately. Sang Min Kim’s large, dusty set implies a disused warehouse, where a few chairs are on the floor and dozens more hang from the rafters. More important, Marc K. Fisher’s lighting design emphasizes the gloom of the setting while obscuring the youthful features of Hourihan and Stalter. Devon Ritchie’s smelly looking costumes, heavy makeup and superb wigs build up the effort. Best of all, both move with pained, arthritic but not stylized steps.

Ionesco’s view of what’s “absurd” here is bleaker than in Bald Soprano, more in line with Camus’ vision that Martin Esslin adapted. Many audience members may feel a sense of déjà vu, even if they have never seen or read The Chairs before, when they hear the duo frantically preparing chairs for invisible guests—including the Emperor—who will hear an Orator arrive to proclaim the Old Man’s discovery of the meaning of life. So much of The Chairs is a matter of, ahem, “waiting for the Orator.” Not surprising, then, countless college literature instructors have asked their students to write analyses comparing The Chairs with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which opened in Paris one year later. Only the Orator does arrive, and he’s a tall, sleek fellow (Nicholas Petrovich) in a white suit. But wouldn’t it be absurd to receive consolation in that?

Here’s the good news regarding SU Drama’s teaming of The Bald Soprano and The Chairs. Well-designed sets and costumes, disciplined performances and polished, intelligent direction do not dull the sharpness of Eugene Ionesco’s jagged edge.                    

These one-acts run through Sunday, Nov.22. See Times Table for information.