Back to the Future for Absurdists : ‘50/60 Vision’ festival looks back at the works of Ionesco, Beckett, Albee and others for meaning in the art of theater

Absurd. Definition, please, maestro.

Webster’s says anything that is “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound or incongruous.”

Is this “absurd” as in “Theatre of the Absurd”? Not exactly. Critic/scholar Martin Esslin, who coined the phrase and forged (some would say forced) it into the vocabulary of theater in his book of the same name, has a thoroughly non-absurdist explanation for inventing it:

“ ‘Absurd’ originally means ‘out of harmony’ in a musical context,” he wrote in his book. “Hence the dictionary definition. . . . This is not the sense in which . . . it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, (playwright Eugene) Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.’ ”

Better. Or at least closer to a description of the 13 seminal pieces by Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. LeRoi Jones) and Sam Shepard to be featured in a marathon festival of plays from the 1950s and ‘60s called “50/60 Vision” and opening Tuesday at the Mark Taper Forum.

Let’s be clear: The writers themselves never created a “movement.” They wrote because they had to and never expected that they were starting anything except a play. Those who are lumped under the rubric Theatre of the Absurd resent its imprecision and repudiate the term.

But it’s a practical invention and if Esslin’s phrase over-generalizes, it is also largely apt. Esslin makes a further, crucial differentiation that sets the writers he calls absurdist apart: While other ‘50s writers such as Camus, Sartre, Anouilh and Giraudoux also acknowledged the senselessness of life, they did so in sensible, lucid terms.

The so-called absurdists, preceded by Genet and launched by Ionesco, went an important step further: they deconstructed language and sense. By abandoning “rational devices and discursive thoughts” they made the medium the message. Voila .

So why, 40 years after it began and at a time when men and women all over the globe appear to be behaving more sensibly than they have in decades, are we about to witness a festival of plays that, for want of a better phrase, attempt to address life’s infinite absurdity? Is it absurd?

The answer from Edward Parone, who conceived and produced “50/60 Vision,” is paradoxical. The purpose of this mass revival of short plays, he said, is to signal the death of language in a world standing on the brink of the death of art.

“It certainly isn’t to go back and say ‘This is what we should be doing,’ ” he said. “We turn to the past to see the future. These plays distill the essence of theater. Simplicity. Compression. They’re written by writers in love with language. All you need to do them is an actor and the word.

“Language as a force is disappearing,” he insisted. “It’s symptomatic of what’s happening in the world. Look at the spectacles. Lyrics don’t even matter. Theater is more and more about the business of theater, not the art of theater. Like the art world, which is all about the selling and the marketing of art. It doesn’t matter about the creative artist.”

Which means, of course, that it does. By focusing on these ‘50s/’60s writers who dominated their work, Parone is tacitly rebuking a theater scene that he sees as now dominated by directors.

“It’s an overrated profession and relatively new,” he said, indicting himself with the rest (he was associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum with Gordon Davidson from its inception in 1967 until 1979). “So many directors now look at a play to see what they can do to it, not for it or with it. It diminishes the role of the writer. And of the actor. It’s all gone too far. Plays are being ‘workshopped’ to death. These plays,” he said, about his selections, “were staged as they came out of the writers’ minds. Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter all knew each other. No one told them what to write or how to write it. It was about the consolidation of a creative moment in time. The day that everything changed.”

Indeed. With the advent of Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano” in 1950 and “The Lesson” in 1951, the existential theater of the ‘40s, written in muscular, lyrical, frequently lofty language that came in complete sentences, gave way forever to terse, dislocated syntax, absent logic and taut, repetitive scenes.

Alfred Jarry and Arthur Adamov were the precursors, in their more conscious and singular struggles to cast off superannuated convention. But Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” is virtually all that we ever see today of that tortured, rocky ground work. By the time “Waiting for Godot” opened at the Theatre de Babylone in 1953 (with Roger Blin directing and playing Pozzo), absurdist theater, so-called, had irreversibly invaded the mainstream.

The occasion was not altogether gleeful. Not everyone was prepared to accept this new theater. Managements and critics were largely baffled by these non-plays or anti-plays (Ionesco’s term) making non-sense or anti-sense. The novelty was too radical, the change too abrupt.

In the main, it was left to other playwrights and some directors to recognize that the earth had moved in some major way and that the theater would never be quite the same again. It was their actions, their endorsements, that defended “The Chairs” and kept the bleak tragi-farce of “Godot,” in which “nothing happens,” running for 400 performances at the Babylone before transferring to another Paris theater--this strange, pivotal play written in French by a laconic Irishman because, as he told a student, it was easier for him to write without style in French.

(“Godot,” directed by Joseph Chaikin, is concurrently playing at Taper, Too in a production that complements the festival.)

In this brave new theater that exploded chiefly from Beckett and Ionesco, language was heightened by its very devaluation. Its deliberate breakdown underscored the impossibility of real communication in a world where mass communicating was made easy, but where language itself was becoming increasingly superfluous.

A few weeks ago, in Paris, Ionesco, 80, the elder statesman of the genre , recalled those early impulses.

“Beckett and I,” he said, “avoided fashionable subjects in favor of the larger existential themes: the human condition, death, misery, the sadness of being without God. God is present in this theater by his absence.

“We tried to reverse the values and pick up ageless themes. Biblical themes. Beckett is the Book of Job. I am perhaps Revelations. Men don’t understand one another. Kafka wrote a novella called ‘The Fist’ about the Tower of Babel. People built and built and built, but only to fulfill their own temporal goals, not with the idea of getting to God. So God knocked it down with his fist. The people were scattered and never again understood each other.

“We wanted to deal with essentials--not politics, not love, but with existential malaise , the misery of man in the world without God.”

In writing “The Lesson,” featured in this festival, “I wanted,” he said, “as with ‘The Bald Soprano,’ to write a play that wasn’t a play. An anti-play. It became a play more or less in spite of itself. It was written in defiance of existing rules. It was a kind of play that wasn’t being written at that time.

“I was disgusted with the theater as it was. There were some felicitous writers, such as Cocteau or Giraudoux (of whom I was not especially fond; I found him too literary, too addicted to the social chatter of the 16th Arrondissement . .

“The boulevardier theater of the time dealt with business and adultery, but it was a degradation of Racine’s theater. In Racine there was adultery and people died of it. In the 19th Century there was adultery, but people died laughing at it.”

This metaphysical quest for an absolute was something Ionesco feels he shared only with Beckett.

“Pinter and others like him were playing,” he reflected. “We were playing too, but not having fun. Our game was a lot more tragic. This was not noticed right away. The dislocation of language was scary at the time. In ‘Bald Soprano’ and my latest play, ‘Voyage Among the Dead,’ (I use) a metalanguage or a language beyond language that perhaps God can understand.”

But if he hoped God was listening, Ionesco never expected that the world would be. “I didn’t even think my plays were plays,” he said. And yet “The Bald Soprano” and “The Lesson” are still running in Paris with no end in sight.

“Our theater is not absurd,” he added wistfully. “It is realistic, but of a realism that digs deeper than reality. My initial question was that of the philosophers: Why is there something instead of nothing? An unthinkable thought. And if there is nothing, and if the world still exists, and if we end up accepting--with some difficulty--the existential miracle, why is there evil rather than good . . . ?

“I don’t know what absurdity is,” he concluded. “Not knowing that, I can’t claim to know what is not absurd. We are born to die. That is something I consider absurd. That men kill each other with such glee is absurd. But there is too much human sentiment in the word absurd. I don’t know how to name it.”

In London, we caught Pinter pausing. He was catching his breath, as he prepared to deliver the Salman Rushdie text for the Herbert Read Memorial Lecture last month. “A Slight Ache” (1959, originally a radio play) and “The Collection” (1961, a television play), both included in this “Vision,” are, he said, among his favorites.

But can he recall what made him write them? “I thought nothing when I wrote them,” he said, “except that I needed to get something out of my system.”

That “something” may also have had something to do with his lifelong admiration for Beckett, whom he knew and to whom he sent his texts for comment. The element of mystery in both three-character plays and the fact that one of the characters in “Slight Ache,” the match vendor, is completely silent, feel at least inspired by Beckett’s spareness. But the mystery in Pinter’s work is more temporal, more rooted in man’s inhumanity to man than in any serious contemplation of divine nothingness or retribution.

“That was 30 years ago,” he continued, attempting to resurrect the moment. “The impetus was--well, I have no idea where the play (“Slight Ache”) actually came from. But I’d just had ‘The Birthday Party’ massacred in London. I was very demoralized, absolutely broke, when (BBC producer) Donald McWhinnie who’d seen ‘The Birthday Party,’ commissioned me to write a play. It saved my life.”

So did the fact that McWhinnie went on to produce “The Caretaker” and that Pinter’s career was effectively launched.

“The image of the house (in “Slight Ache”) was from my childhood. I was 12 or 13, during the war and the bombings, and I was evacuated to a house in the country. I’d never seen so many flowers in my life. . . . As for ‘The Collection,’ it was all about sex, as you know. What can I say? . . . “

Albee’s “The Zoo Story” (1959), “The Sandbox” (1960) and “The American Dream” (1961), all featured here, were the early stirrings of a playwright with highly eclectic styles.

For this eclecticism, Albee credits early theatergoing and exposure to such varied theatrical events as “Jumbo” (seen at “six or seven”) “On Your Toes” and “The Iceman Cometh” among others. In the ‘50s, after being thrown out of college he was in New York “finding myself. I don’t know where I’d left myself,” he said wryly, “but the Off Broadway scene was full of Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett, Brecht. I’d written all my life, I’d failed at everything else and I was closing in on 30. I was needing to do something . So I wrote ‘The Zoo Story.’

“Certain specifics of that play came from my experience delivering telegrams for Western Union on the Upper West Side which, in those days, was a very sad neighborhood. But what made me write a play about somebody trying to stop somebody else from closing down . . . ?”

The answer never came.

“The totality of my experience in the theater influenced all my styles,” he continued. “ ‘Zoo Story’ is naturalistic, but ‘The American Dream’ and ‘The Sandbox’ are highly stylized, satiric pieces. The beginning of ‘The American Dream’ was an intentional hommage to Ionesco, though the critics only saw it as a steal. ‘The Sandbox’ is the only play that has no references to other playwrights. I wanted to include a musical score, so the musician became a part of the play. It is dedicated to my maternal grandmother whom I liked a lot and whom I felt wasn’t treated quite as well as she should have been. She wasn’t swept under the table, but figuratively. . . . “

Beckett is most heavily represented in the festival (with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” “Happy Days,” “Play,” “Eh, Joe” and the parallel “Godot”). The other plays in the festival are Genet’s “The Maids” (1949), Shepard’s “Red Cross” (1966) and Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman” (1964). There are, too, the inevitable omissions, such as any number of other Ionesco and Shepard plays, the work of Fernando Arrabal, Witold Gombrowicz, Max Frisch and Jack Gelber’s “The Connection.”

How were the plays selected?

“I want to say idiosyncratically,” Parone replied, “but the fact is I wanted to get as many of the plays together as possible. They were short, in the first place. They were all singular--different from each other--and they get absurdly lumped together,” he winced, “as the Theatre of the Absurd.”

“Dutchman” is the only black piece featured in “50/60 Vision.” It was a highly subjective choice. Parone’s maiden voyage as a young director in New York in 1964 was the original staging of this play.

“I felt then that black theater would have to go the way of LeRoi Jones or take a step backward into realistic drama. ‘Dutchman’ is the work of a poet. It is quintessential black theater--a genuine expression of the black soul, as near as I’ve ever seen it in the theater.” “Red Cross” was a truly idiosyncratic choice (“I wanted an early Shepard play from the ‘60s. Why this one? I just liked it,” Parone said) and to some extent “The Maids” (“Genet was one of the leaders. He preceded Ionesco and Beckett and he figured importantly as a writer in general, not just as a playwright. There are only two short plays by Genet, ‘Deathwatch’ and ‘The Maids.’ I picked ‘The Maids’ ”).

Beyond that “The fun is in the discovery or rediscovery,” he said, “the unwrapping of something. I hope the audience, after it sees (these plays), doesn’t applaud.

“I hope it just sits there.”

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The schedule-- “Play,” “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “The Collection”: Evenings: Tue., April 13, 19, 25, 29, May 1, 12; matinees: March 31, May 6. “The Sandbox” and “Happy Days”: Evenings: Fri., March 30, April 6, 12, 18, 22, 24, May 5; matinees: April 29, May 12. “Red Cross” and “Dutchman”: Evenings: next Sun., April 1, 4, 10, 21, May 4, 10; matinees: April 15, 28. “The Lesson” and “The Zoo Story”: Evenings: March 22, April 3, 14, 27, May 3, 9, 13; matinees: April 1, 21. “A Slight Ache” and “The American Dream”: Evenings: March 24, 31, April 5, 20, 26, May 2, 6, 8; matinees: April 14, May 13. “Eh Joe” and “The Maids”: Evenings: March 28-29, April 11, 15, 17, 28, May 11; matinees: April 22, May 5.

Curtain times: Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. matinees, 2:30 p.m.

Marathon Weekend (all 13 plays): April 7-8, 2-5:30 and 7-10:30 p.m.

Tickets: $22-$28. Reservations: (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300; deaf community, TDD (213) 680-4017.