Season 2009-2010
A close look at the "existential" and the "absurd"
"I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously." Eugene Ionesco, Hermit 1973
"B" FOR BECKETT (A NIGHT OF SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAYS)
"PLAY"
"NOT I"
"ENDGAME"
September 2009
"Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain." Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy in Nobel Prize Presentation Speech.
EUGENE IONESCO "BALD SOPRANO"
November 2009
"Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician." E. Ionesco, as quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book: A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 44
JEAN PAUL SARTRE "NO EXIT"
February-March 2010
"So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people." J.P. Sartre (No Exit, Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5)
ARTHUR KOPIT "OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELING SO SAD"
May 2010
"The play itself is an exercise in the absurdist mode which borrows freely from various avant-garde styles… and comes off as a curious mixture of satire, irony, fantasy, and farce. Kopit is most interesting when he is most outrageous." Robert Brustein, "Arthur Kopit" in Modern Occasions, selected and edited by Philip Rahv, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966, pp. 133-34.
FROM THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY:
""Existentialism" is a term that belongs to intellectual history. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates, existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. The postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belongs to the club; Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché, parodied in countless books and films by Woody Allen." It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position… But …the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry…"
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