Misplaced Pages

#235764

91-543: Christopher Ferdinand Durang (January 2, 1949 – April 2, 2024) was an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. His work was especially popular in the 1980s, though his career seemed to get a second wind in the late 1990s. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You was Durang's watershed play as it brought him to national prominence when it won him the Obie Award for Best Playwright (1980). His play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike won

182-473: A 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ." Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes . Beckett said, though he liked Nausea , he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher". The "absurd" or "new theater" movement

273-432: A book that she loved and often reread, Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter ). Generally, the story contains the same plot as the play, with certain sections given more emphasis, and character details edited (for example, in the story, Jim nicknames Tom "Slim", instead of "Shakespeare" ). Another basis for the play is a screenplay Williams wrote under the title of The Gentleman Caller . Williams had been briefly contracted as

364-403: A common denominator—the "absurd", a word that Esslin defines with a quotation from Ionesco: "absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective." The French philosopher Albert Camus , in his 1942 essay " Myth of Sisyphus ", describes the human situation as meaningless and absurd. The absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or man as

455-423: A complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good". Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly. Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or communism; at

546-439: A far more vital contemporary fashion." Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important – were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really

637-546: A gaucho author established himself as a precursor of the theater of the absurd in Brazilian lands. Qorpo-Santo , pseudonym of José Joaquim de Campos Leão, released during the last years of his life several theatrical works that can be classified as precursors of the theater of the absurd. However, he is little known, even in his homeland, but works such as "Mateus e Mateusa" are gradually being rediscovered by scholars in Brazil and around

728-627: A happy ending. The play had not found an audience and production was being considered for closing after the opening night in Chicago. Then the reviews by critics Ashton Stevens in The Chicago Herald-American and Claudia Cassidy in the Chicago Tribune came out. They praised the production, especially the writing and the performance by Laurette Taylor, with Cassidy writing about it several times. These reviews drove Chicago audiences to

819-458: A high school student), though it has also been suggested that Laura may incorporate aspects of Williams himself, referencing his introverted nature and obsessive focus on just one aspect of life (writing for Williams and glass animals in Laura's case). Williams, who was close to Rose growing up, learned to his horror that in 1943, in his absence, his sister had been subjected to a botched lobotomy . Rose

910-453: A junk heap on stage and the sounds of breathing. The plot may also revolve around an unexplained metamorphosis, a supernatural change, or a shift in the laws of physics. For example, in Ionesco's Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It , a couple must deal with a corpse that is steadily growing larger and larger; Ionesco never fully reveals the identity of the corpse, how this person died, or why it

1001-566: A large number of guests to their home, but these guests are invisible, so all we see are empty chairs, a representation of their absence. Likewise, the action of Godot is centered around the absence of a man named Godot, for whom the characters perpetually wait. In many of Beckett's later plays, most features are stripped away and what's left is a minimalistic tableau: a woman walking slowly back and forth in Footfalls , for example, or in Breath only

SECTION 10

#1732876418236

1092-711: A nomination for a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for A History of the American Film , and he won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2013 for his play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike . Durang was awarded numerous fellowships and high-profile grants including a Guggenheim , a Rockefeller Foundation , the CBS Playwriting Fellowship, the Lecomte du Nouy Foundation grant, and the Kenyon Festival Theatre Playwriting Prize . Durang

1183-480: A parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the " well-made play ". In his introduction to the book Absurd Drama (1965), Esslin wrote: The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message

1274-599: A puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano (1950). Although the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville , mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either

1365-453: A quiet dance, in which he accidentally brushes against her glass menagerie, knocking a glass unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. Jim then compliments Laura and kisses her. After Jim tells Laura that he is engaged to be married, Laura asks him to take the broken unicorn as a gift and he then leaves. When Amanda learns that Jim is to be married, she turns her anger upon Tom and cruelly lashes out at him, although Tom did not know that Jim

1456-425: A review written in 1994: 1) narcissism; 2) fear of engagement with a danger-filled world; 3) the strangulating nature of family ties; 4) sexual disorientation and the tenuousness of individual identity. To this list the abusive power of authority figures could be added. While Durang's use of parody and his criticism of many social institutions might appear overly cynical at times, he stated: ... when I say everyone

1547-454: A routine, or in a metafictional conceit, trapped in a story; the title characters in Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , for example, find themselves in a story ( Hamlet ) in which the outcome has already been written. The plots of many absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this

1638-569: A secretary. He grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey , and attended Catholic schools: Our Lady of Peace School ( New Providence ) and Delbarton ( Morristown ). He received a B.A. in English from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Yale School of Drama . His work often deals critically with issues of child abuse , Roman Catholic dogma , culture, and homosexuality . Ben Brantley summarized key themes from Durang's plays in

1729-536: A sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation. In the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd , Esslin quotes the French philosopher Albert Camus's essay "Myth of Sisyphus", as it uses the word "absurdity" to describe the human situation: "In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels

1820-571: A stranger. … This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." Esslin presents the four defining playwrights of the movement as Samuel Beckett , Arthur Adamov , Eugène Ionesco , and Jean Genet , and in subsequent editions he added a fifth playwright, Harold Pinter . Other writers associated with this group by Esslin and other critics include Tom Stoppard , Friedrich Dürrenmatt , Fernando Arrabal , Edward Albee , Boris Vian , and Jean Tardieu . The mode of most "absurdist" plays

1911-515: A televised Carol Burnett special, features a grieving widow (Burnett) who is disturbed at her husband's wake by an eccentric mourner, played by Robin Williams . Durang lived in Pipersville, Pennsylvania , with his husband, actor/playwright John Augustine. They began their relationship in 1986 and were legally married in 2014. In 2016, Durang was diagnosed with logopenic progressive aphasia , which

SECTION 20

#1732876418236

2002-506: A writer to MGM , and he apparently envisioned Ethel Barrymore and Judy Garland for the roles that eventually became Amanda and Laura, although when the play was eventually filmed in 1950, Gertrude Lawrence was cast as Amanda and Jane Wyman as Laura. In 1944, after several reworkings, while touring on the road, the play arrived at the Civic Theatre in Chicago. The producers wanted more changes and were heavily pressuring Williams for

2093-467: Is tragicomedy . As Nell says in Endgame , "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness … it's the most comical thing in the world". Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of the "absurd drama". Shakespeare's influence is acknowledged directly in the titles of Ionesco's Macbett and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . Friedrich Dürrenmatt says in his essay "Problems of

2184-434: Is a play, after all, with acted characters; it allows us a distance we couldn’t have in reality.  To me this distance allows me to find some rather serious topics funny. Durang suggested that his form of humor requires a double-consciousness, an ability to register scenes of cruelty or pain, while simultaneously comprehending the humor.  He credited Arthur Kopit 's “tragicfarce” Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in

2275-507: Is a survivor and a pragmatist, Amanda yearns for the comforts and admiration she remembers from her days as a fêted debutante. She worries especially about the future of her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp (an after-effect of a bout of pleurosis ) and a tremulous insecurity about the outside world. Tom works in a shoe warehouse doing his best to support the family. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and struggles to write while spending much of his spare time going to

2366-540: Is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language." In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity" - or the repetition of life even though the end result will be the same no matter what and everything is essentially pointless - as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame , Beckett's work focuses, "on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as

2457-658: Is also frequently compared to surrealism's predecessor, Dadaism (for example, the Dadaist plays by Tristan Tzara performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich). Many of the absurdists had direct connections with the Dadaists and surrealists. Ionesco, Adamov, and Arrabal for example, were friends with surrealists still living in Paris at the time including Paul Eluard and André Breton ,

2548-406: Is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it

2639-540: Is available on the BBC iPlayer The first television version, recorded on videotape and starring Shirley Booth as Amanda, was broadcast on December 8, 1966, as part of CBS Playhouse . Barbara Loden played Laura, Hal Holbrook played Tom and Pat Hingle played the Gentleman Caller. Booth was nominated for an Emmy for her performance. The videotape, long thought to be lost, was reconstructed from unedited takes found in

2730-653: Is continually growing, but the corpse ultimately – and, again, without explanation – floats away. In Tardieu's "The Keyhole" a lover watches a woman through a keyhole as she removes her clothes and then her flesh. Like Pirandello, many absurdists use meta-theatrical techniques to explore role fulfillment, fate, and the theatricality of theatre. This is true for many of Genet's plays: for example, in The Maids , two maids pretend to be their mistress; in The Balcony brothel patrons take on elevated positions in role-playing games, but

2821-458: Is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections. According to Martin Esslin, absurdism is "the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose" Absurdist drama asks its viewer to "draw his own conclusions, make his own errors". Though Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as nonsense, they have something to say and can be understood". Esslin makes a distinction between

Christopher Durang - Misplaced Pages Continue

2912-448: Is crazy that means it's a very bad day where the amount of crazy people in the world has spread out to the entire universe and it doesn't seem possible to cope with anything... I think we're all neurotic . And I do think relationships are certainly difficult. Nonetheless, those lines in the play do get a laugh, so there's something. It's not as despairing as it sounds, but I don't not believe it. Much of Durang's style can be attributed to

3003-590: Is no longer entering from the outside but exists within the confined space. Other absurdists use this kind of plot, as in Albee's A Delicate Balance : Harry and Edna take refuge at the home of their friends, Agnes and Tobias, because they suddenly become frightened. They have difficulty explaining what has frightened them: Absence, emptiness, nothingness, and unresolved mysteries are central features in many absurdist plots: for example, in The Chairs , an old couple welcomes

3094-506: Is so overcome by shyness that she is unable to join the others at dinner, and she claims to be ill. After dinner, however, Jim and Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for the electricity to be restored. (Tom has not paid the power bill, which hints to the audience that he is banking the bill money and preparing to leave the household.) As the evening progresses, Jim recognizes Laura's feelings of inferiority and encourages her to think better of herself. He and Laura share

3185-534: Is thought to be caused by a form of Alzheimer's disease ; as with all forms of aphasia, it primarily impeded his ability to process language, though it subsequently affected his short-term memory. Durang gradually withdrew from public life before his condition was publicly announced in 2022. Durang died from complications of aphasia at his Pennsylvania home on April 2, 2024, at the age of 75. Durang received Obie Awards for Sister Mary Ignatius , The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Betty's Summer Vacation . He received

3276-838: Is typical of Pinter: Much of the dialogue in absurdist drama (especially in Beckett's and Albee's plays) reflects this kind of evasiveness and inability to make a connection. When language that is apparently nonsensical appears, it also demonstrates this disconnection. It can be used for comic effect, as in Lucky's long speech in Godot when Pozzo says Lucky is demonstrating a talent for "thinking" as other characters comically attempt to stop him: Nonsense may also be used abusively, as in Pinter's The Birthday Party when Goldberg and McCann torture Stanley with apparently nonsensical questions and non-sequiturs : As in

3367-630: The Juilliard School from 1984 to 2016, teaching playwrights Joshua Harmon and Noah Haidle, as well as Pulitzer-Prize winning David Lindsay-Abaire , who succeeded Durang as co-director. Durang performed as an actor for both stage and screen. He first came to prominence in his Off-Broadway satirical review Das Lusitania Songspiel , which he performed with friend and fellow Yale alum Sigourney Weaver . Later he co-starred in one of his own plays as Matt in The Marriage of Bette and Boo , as well as Man in

3458-644: The National Film Award for Best Supporting Actress , and Geethu Mohandas won the Kerala State Film Award for the best actress. The 2011 Iranian film Here Without Me is also an adaptation of the play, in a contemporary Iranian setting. The first radio adaptation was performed on Theatre Guild on the Air in 1951 starring Helen Hayes as Amanda with Montgomery Clift as Tom, Kathryn Baird as Laura and Karl Malden as Jim. A 1953 adaptation appeared on

3549-615: The PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award in 2012. That same year, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame . Theatre of the Absurd Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd", which begins by focusing on the playwrights Samuel Beckett , Arthur Adamov , and Eugène Ionesco . Esslin says that their plays have

3640-555: The Playhouse Theatre on March 31, 1945, and played there until June 29, 1946. It then moved to the Royale Theatre from July 1, 1946, until its closing on August 3, 1946. The show was directed by Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones . The cast for opening night was as follows: Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda set a standard against which subsequent actresses taking the role were to be judged, typically to their disadvantage. In

3731-702: The Tony Award for Best Play in 2013. The production was directed by Nicholas Martin, and featured Sigourney Weaver , David Hyde Pierce , Kristine Nielsen , Billy Magnussen , Shalita Grant and Genevieve Angelson . Durang was a past co-director of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard . Durang was born on January 2, 1949, in Montclair, New Jersey , the son of two WWII veterans, architect Francis Ferdinand Durang Jr. and Patricia Elizabeth Durang (née Mansfield),

Christopher Durang - Misplaced Pages Continue

3822-598: The "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot or the two main characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead ); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot or Hamm and Clov in Endgame ); the relationship of

3913-584: The 2004 documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There , Broadway veterans rank Taylor's performance as the most memorable of their lives. The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as Best American Play. Williams gave credit to two Chicago critics, Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens, for "giving him a 'start...in a fashion'..." Cassidy wrote that the play had "the stamina of success ..." Stevens wrote that

4004-482: The Civic Theater and the play became a hit, propelling it to Broadway the next year. Two Hollywood film versions of The Glass Menagerie have been produced. The first , released in 1950 and directed by Irving Rapper , stars Gertrude Lawrence (Amanda), Jane Wyman (Laura), Arthur Kennedy (Tom) and Kirk Douglas (Jim). Williams characterized this version, which had an implied happy ending grafted onto it in

4095-551: The Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad as an early influence on his creative vision, a black comedy in which a woman totes her dead husband's corpse on vacation with her. Humor is one way of resolving conflict and anxiety, and black comedy goes a step further to relieve tension regarding subjects that are typically difficult to think about, such as death, family dysfunction, or torture. His plays have been performed nationwide, including on Broadway and Off-Broadway . His works include those in

4186-583: The Old Man and Old Woman in The Chairs " übermarionettes "). Characters are frequently stereotypical, archetypal , or flat character types as in Commedia dell'arte. The more complex characters are in crisis because the world around them is incomprehensible. Many of Pinter's plays, for example, feature characters trapped in an enclosed space menaced by some force the character cannot understand. Pinter's first play

4277-556: The Spirit , 1992's Housesitter , and 1994's The Cowboy Way . Durang wrote a number of unproduced screenplays, including The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valance , The House of Husbands (which he co-authored with Wendy Wasserstein ), and The Adventures of Lola . Wanda's Visit , one of the six one-acts in Durang/Durang, was originally written for the PBS series Trying Times . Durang played

4368-399: The Theatre", "Comedy alone is suitable for us … But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises." Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, theatre of

4459-416: The above examples, nonsense in absurdist theatre may be also used to demonstrate the limits of language while questioning or parodying the determinism of science and the knowability of truth. In Ionesco's The Lesson , a professor tries to force a pupil to understand his nonsensical philology lesson: Traditional plot structures are rarely a consideration in the theatre of the absurd. Plots can consist of

4550-581: The absurd echoes other great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell'arte to vaudeville . Similarly, Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin , the Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences. (Keaton even starred in Beckett's Film in 1965.) As an experimental form of theatre, many theatre of the absurd playwrights employ techniques borrowed from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to

4641-460: The absurd repetition of cliché and routine, as in Godot or The Bald Soprano . Often there is a menacing outside force that remains a mystery; in The Birthday Party , for example, Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley, torture him with absurd questions, and drag him off at the end, but it is never revealed why. In later Pinter plays, such as The Caretaker and The Homecoming , the menace

SECTION 50

#1732876418236

4732-427: The aesthetic of black comedy , a humor style that offers a fatalistic view of life. Durang discussed the particular frame of mind that requires the viewer to distance himself from the horrific episode of human suffering and pain; he explained: I exaggerate awful things further, and then I present it in a way that is funny, and for those of us who find it funny, it has to do with a very clear suspension of disbelief . It

4823-418: The apartment, prepares a special dinner, and converses coquettishly with Jim, almost reliving her youth when she had an abundance of suitors calling on her. Laura discovers that Jim is the boy she was attracted to in high school and has often thought of since, though the relationship between the shy Laura and the "most likely to succeed" Jim was never more than a distant, teasing acquaintanceship. Initially, Laura

4914-496: The archives of the University of Southern California and an audio recording of the original telecast. On December 8, 2016 — fifty years to the day after the original telecast — a re-assembled version of the play was shown on TCM. A second television adaptation was broadcast on ABC on December 16, 1973, starring Katharine Hepburn as Amanda, Sam Waterston as Tom, Joanna Miles as Laura and Michael Moriarty as Jim. It

5005-436: The audience by Tom, the narrator and protagonist, as a memory play based on his recollection of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Because the play is based on memory, Tom cautions the audience that what they see may not be precisely what happened. Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle of middle age, shares a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son Tom, in his early 20s, and his slightly older sister, Laura. Although she

5096-620: The bibliography as well as a collection of one-act parodies meant to be performed in one evening entitled Durang/Durang that includes "Mrs. Sorken", "For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls" (a parody of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams ), "A Stye of the Eye", "Nina in the Morning", "Wanda's Visit", and "Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room". Together with Marsha Norman , Durang directed The Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at

5187-483: The chaos of a world that science and logic have abandoned. Ionesco's recurring character Berenger, for example, faces a killer without motivation in The Killer , and Berenger's logical arguments fail to convince the killer that killing is wrong. In Rhinocéros , Berenger remains the only human on Earth who has not turned into a rhinoceros and must decide whether or not to conform. Characters may find themselves trapped in

5278-418: The characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's The Lesson or in many of Albee's plays, The Zoo Story for example). Despite its reputation for nonsense language, much of the dialogue in absurdist plays is naturalistic. The moments when characters resort to nonsense language or clichés—when words appear to have lost their denotative function, thus creating misunderstanding among

5369-472: The characters—make the theatre of the absurd distinctive. Language frequently gains a certain phonetic, rhythmical, almost musical quality, opening up a wide range of often comedic playfulness. Tardieu, for example, in the series of short pieces Theatre de Chambre arranged the language as one arranges music. Distinctively absurdist language ranges from meaningless clichés to vaudeville-style word play to meaningless nonsense. The Bald Soprano , for example,

5460-582: The dictionary definition of absurd ("out of harmony" in the musical sense) and drama's understanding of the absurd: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." The characters in absurdist drama are lost and floating in an incomprehensible universe and they abandon rational devices and discursive thought because these approaches are inadequate. Many characters appear as automatons stuck in routines speaking only in cliché (Ionesco called

5551-516: The earlier incarnation, it has yet to receive a physical media release. In 2004, an Indian adaptation of the play, filmed in the Malayalam language, was released, titled Akale ( At a Distance ). Directed by Shyamaprasad , the story is set in the southern Indian state of Kerala in the 1970s, in an Anglo-Indian/Latin Catholic household. The characters were renamed to fit context (the surname Wingfield

SECTION 60

#1732876418236

5642-406: The end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros. Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there." Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the theatre of the absurd and existentialism: the theatre of the absurd shows

5733-557: The failure of man without recommending a solution. In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy  [ fr ; ro ] , comparing the absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in

5824-448: The founder of surrealism, and Beckett translated many surrealist poems by Breton and others from French into English. Many of the absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre , the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness , and many of the absurdists had

5915-1559: The influence of the absurdists grew, the style spread to other countries—with playwrights either directly influenced by absurdists in Paris or playwrights labelled absurdist by critics. In England, some of those whom Esslin considered practitioners of the theatre of the absurd include Harold Pinter , Tom Stoppard , N. F. Simpson , James Saunders , and David Campton ; in the United States, Edward Albee , Sam Shepard , Jack Gelber , and John Guare ; in Poland, Tadeusz Różewicz ; Sławomir Mrożek , and Tadeusz Kantor ; in Italy, Dino Buzzati ; and in Germany, Peter Weiss , Wolfgang Hildesheimer , and Günter Grass . In India, both Mohit Chattopadhyay and Mahesh Elkunchwar have also been labeled absurdists. Other international absurdist playwrights include Tawfiq el-Hakim from Egypt; Hanoch Levin from Israel; Miguel Mihura from Spain; José de Almada Negreiros from Portugal; Mikhail Volokhov from Russia; Yordan Radichkov from Bulgaria; and playwright and former Czech president Václav Havel . Plays within this group are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on human beings trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of incomprehensibility

6006-404: The initial issue of its theatre series. The production starred Jessica Tandy as Amanda, Montgomery Clift as Tom, Julie Harris as Laura and David Wayne as the gentleman caller. The recording is now available in the form of an audio app. In 2020, BBC Radio 3 adapted the play with Anastasia Hille as Amanda, George MacKay as Tom, Patsy Ferran as Laura, Sope Dirisu as Jim. This version

6097-496: The language of absurdist theater becomes secondary to the poetry of the concrete and objectified images of the stage. Many of Beckett's plays devalue language for the sake of the striking tableau. Harold Pinter—famous for his "Pinter pause"—presents more subtly elliptical dialogue; often the primary things characters should address are replaced by ellipsis or dashes. The following exchange between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker

6188-562: The line between theatre and reality starts to blur. Another complex example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead : it is a play about two minor characters in Hamlet ; these characters, in turn, have various encounters with the players who perform The Mousetrap , the play-within-the-play in Hamlet . In Stoppard's Travesties , James Joyce and Tristan Tzara slip in and out of the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest . Plots are frequently cyclical: for example, Endgame begins where

6279-513: The movies—or so he says—at all hours of the night. Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor (or, as she puts it, a "gentleman caller") for Laura, whose crippling shyness and anxiety has led her to drop out of both high school and a subsequent secretarial course, and who spends much of her time polishing and arranging her collection of little glass animals. Pressured by his mother to help find a caller for Laura, Tom invites Jim, an acquaintance from work, home for dinner. The delighted Amanda spruces up

6370-556: The original production of Laughing Wild . Durang denounced the Robert Altman 1987 film adaptation of Beyond Therapy , calling it "horrific". He accused Altman of totally rewriting the script "so that all psychology is thrown out the window, and the characters dash around acting crazy but with literally no behavioral logic underneath." Durang appeared as an actor in the 1987 comedy The Secret of My Success , 1988's Mr. North , 1989's Penn & Teller Get Killed , 1990's In

6461-457: The part of The Waiter in that production. Durang appeared as himself on the October 11, 1986 episode of Saturday Night Live , hosted by his longtime friend Sigourney Weaver. In the episode, Durang and Weaver parodied the works of Bertolt Brecht , and both were interviewed in the debut of the recurring sketch Church Chat , with Durang as himself. Durang's 1987 sketch "The Funeral", written for

6552-534: The play ended – at the beginning of the play, Clov says, "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished" – and themes of cycle, routine, and repetition are explored throughout. The Glass Menagerie The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister. In writing

6643-412: The play had "the courage of true poetry ..." The characters and story mimic Williams' own life more closely than any of his other works: Williams (whose real name was Thomas) closely resembles Tom, and his mother inspires Amanda. His sickly and mentally unstable older sister Rose provides the basis for the fragile Laura (whose nickname in the play is "Blue Roses", a result of a bout of pleurosis as

6734-522: The play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller . The play premiered in Chicago on 26 December 1944. After a shaky start, it was championed by Chicago critics Ashton Stevens and Claudia Cassidy , whose enthusiasm helped build audiences so the producers could move the play to Broadway where it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1945. The Glass Menagerie

6825-421: The radio series Best Plays starring Evelyn Varden as Amanda and Geraldine Page as Laura. Jane Wyman recreated her film portrayal of Laura for a 1954 adaptation on Lux Radio Theatre with Fay Bainter as Amanda and Frank Lovejoy as Tom and Tom Brown as Jim. The 1953 version is not known to survive but recordings of the other two are in circulation. In 1964, Caedmon Records produced an LP version as

6916-543: The style of American films from that era, as the worst adaptation of his work. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, "As much as we hate to say so, Miss Lawrence's performance does not compare with the tender and radiant creation of the late Laurette Taylor on the stage." The film has never been released on home media. In 1987, a second adaptation was released, directed by Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward (Amanda), Karen Allen (Laura), John Malkovich (Tom) and James Naughton (Jim). If anything, this

7007-573: The theatre of the absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear ; Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz ; the Russians Daniil Kharms , Nikolai Erdman , and others; Bertolt Brecht 's distancing techniques in his " epic theatre "; and the "dream plays" of August Strindberg . One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello , especially Six Characters in Search of an Author . Pirandello

7098-454: The world. Artaud's " Theatre of Cruelty " (presented in Theatre and its Double ) was a particularly important philosophical treatise. Artaud claimed theatre's reliance on literature was inadequate and that the true power of theatre was in its visceral impact. Artaud was a surrealist , and many other members of the surrealist group were significant influences on the absurdists. Absurdism

7189-460: Was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was the first work to be called " surreal ". A precursor is Alfred Jarry whose Ubu plays scandalized Paris in the 1890s. Likewise, the concept of 'pataphysics —"the science of imaginary solutions"—first presented in Jarry's Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien ( Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician )

7280-473: Was The Room – in which the main character, Rose, is menaced by Riley who invades her safe space though the actual source of menace remains a mystery. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt 's The Visit, the main character, Alfred, is menaced by Claire Zachanassian; Claire, richest woman in the world, with a decaying body and multiple husbands throughout the play, has guaranteed a payout for anyone in the town willing to kill Alfred. Characters in absurdist drama may also face

7371-406: Was Williams' first successful play; he went on to become one of America's most highly regarded playwrights. "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you an illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." The beginning of Tom's opening soliloquy. The play is introduced to

7462-438: Was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen . According to W. B. Worthen , Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use " metatheatre — roleplaying , plays-within-plays , and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity ". Another influential playwright

7553-640: Was a member of the council for the Dramatists Guild of America , and was named the 2024 recipient of the guild's lifetime achievement award. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2006 for Miss Witherspoon . On May 17, 2010, he was presented with the very first Luminary Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for his work Off-Off-Broadway . Durang was awarded

7644-434: Was changed to D'Costa, reflecting the part-Portuguese heritage of the family — probably on the absent father's side, since the mother is Anglo-Indian), but the story remains essentially the same. It stars Prithviraj Sukumaran as Neil D'Costa (Tom Wingfield), Geethu Mohandas as Rosemary D'Costa (Laura Wingfield), Sheela as Margaret D'Costa (Amanda Wingfield) and Tom George Kolath as Freddy Evans (Jim O'Connor). Sheela won

7735-451: Was engaged. Tom seems quite surprised by this, and it is possible that Jim was only making up the story of the engagement as he felt that the family was trying to set him up with Laura, and he had no romantic interest in her. The play concludes with Tom saying that he left home soon afterward and never returned. He then bids farewell to his mother and sister and asks Laura to blow out the candles. The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway in

7826-454: Was even less well-received than the earlier film and sank without much attention. However, The New York Times reviewer noted it "starts stiffly and gets better as it goes along, with the dinner-party sequence its biggest success; in this highly charged situation, Miss Woodward's Amanda indeed seems to flower. But quiet reverence is its prevailing tone, and in the end, that seems thoroughly at odds with anything Williams ever intended." Similar to

7917-502: Was inspirational to many later absurdists, some of whom joined the Collège de 'pataphysique, founded in honor of Jarry in 1948 (Ionesco, Arrabal, and Vian were given the title "transcendent satrape of the Collège de 'pataphysique"). The Theatre Alfred Jarry , founded by Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac , housed several absurdist plays, including ones by Ionesco and Adamov. In the 1860s,

8008-483: Was inspired by a language book in which characters would exchange empty clichés that never ultimately amounted to true communication or true connection. Likewise, the characters in The Bald Soprano —like many other absurdist characters—go through routine dialogue full of clichés without actually communicating anything substantive or making a human connection. In other cases, the dialogue is purposefully elliptical;

8099-478: Was left incapacitated and institutionalized for the rest of her life. With the success of The Glass Menagerie , Williams was to give half of the royalties from the play to his mother. He later designated half of the royalties from his play Summer and Smoke to provide for Rose's care, arranging for her move from the state hospital to a private sanitarium. Eventually, he was to leave the bulk of his estate to ensure Rose's continuing care. Rose died in 1996. The play

8190-637: Was originally a Paris-based (and a Rive Gauche ) avant-garde phenomenon tied to extremely small theatres in the Quartier Latin . Some of the absurdists, such as Jean Genet , Jean Tardieu , and Boris Vian ., were born in France. Many other absurdists were born elsewhere but lived in France, writing often in French: Beckett from Ireland; Ionesco from Romania; Arthur Adamov from Russia; Alejandro Jodorowsky from Chile and Fernando Arrabal from Spain. As

8281-450: Was reworked from one of Williams' short stories "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" (1943; published 1948). The story is also written from the point of view of narrator Tom Wingfield, and many of his soliloquies from The Glass Menagerie seem lifted straight from this original. Certain elements have been omitted from the play, including the reasons for Laura's fascination with Jim's freckles (linked to

#235764