The Lesson and
The 1979 edition of the Concise Oxford Companion to Theater smugly announced that theater of the absurd–the darkly comic style of drama that rose out of the ashes of World War II–“seems to have spent itself.” But the sad truth is that theater of the absurd never died–it was absorbed into mainstream America, where it haunts us in the form of robotic bureaucrats, virtual love affairs, and automated phone systems that aim “to serve you better” by making you hold for a quarter of an hour. Every time a congressman twists the language to the breaking point, arguing that the NEA must be abolished because it “censors” those it doesn’t fund, that’s theater of the greatest absurdity. And every time someone abandons real life for the satisfactions of cybersex and chat-room romance, that person has entered a world Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco would have recognized as their own.
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We’re so saturated by the absurdity of everyday events that theater of the absurd is hard to pull off. No matter what insanity an absurdist playwright cooks up, the world can provide a greater one. Among Ionesco’s jokes in his one-act The Lesson is that the French word for “knife” is “knife.” But that linguistic absurdity pales beside the fact that, at the Dayton peace accords, the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians–who speak essentially the same language, Serbo-Croatian–all insisted on their own translators, a move not unlike an Illinoisan asking for a translator so she can speak to someone from Virginia.
In Desire, Desire, Desire Durang parodies Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, making Blanche much more the hapless puppet of destiny than she is in the original. He also twists the plot: this time Blanche must suffer both the indignity of living with the troglodyte Stanley and the nuisance of living in a play that refuses to coalesce into Streetcar. In Desire, Desire, Desire Stella disappears for years at a time, characters from other Williams plays and from plays by such writers as Eugene O’Neill appear suddenly at the Kowalskis’ door, and everyone is so caught up in Durang’s world that no one really listens when Blanche prattles on about Belle Reve or her tragic first love.
In less capable hands, the hapless, passive pupil and the pretentious, puffed-up professor would seem mere caricatures. But Fletcher and Dollymore, fully invested in their roles, give Ionesco’s characters an indispensable third dimension, with the result that we don’t just see the absurdity of the world, we feel it in the pit of our stomachs. i
