Book Club | Theatre and the Question of the Absurd

This four-session course will look at key plays and authors of what has come to be called (notably by critic Martin Esslin) “the Theatre of the Absurd.” With each play, participants will develop their notion of what “the absurd,” as a concept and as a technique, might have meant in the crafting and reception of these plays, and what it could mean now.

Should we think of “the absurd” as a philosophical concept (life is meaningless, with no metaphysical presence or authority) – to which the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre responded by insisting on human responsibility to create meaning? Should we think of “the absurd” as the realm of non-sense (incoherent thought and /or language; disassociation of what is said from what is seen) that captures how we often communicate? Or, is “the absurd” how we label behavior that is unacceptable or incomprehensible? Could “absurdist theatre” engage all of these definitions? The course will also ask why it is that all of these plays have seen recent and successful politicized productions, two (Rhinoceros and The Maids) being newly translated by the brilliant British dramatist Martin Crimp. Could it be that the absurd, seen in a certain light, speaks pointedly to our current historical moment of political crises and insecurity?

Participants will be expected to have read the dramatic text BEFORE coming to the relevant session.

FIRST SESSION: An Overview: The class will look at how and why this so-called theatre of the absurd arrived on the Parisian stage at the end of World War II, what the original reaction to the works revealed, and why this theatre was ultimately called “absurd.” The session will cover Jean Genet’s The Maids (as translated by Bernard Frechtman). The least layered of Genet’s plays in terms of historical representation and the fraught question of who controls the gaze that determines identity, The Maids nevertheless queries the performance of identity and the location of power in society. The class will look especially at Genet’s use of theatre-in-the-theatre, the ritualistic structure of the play, and the ways in which Genet destabilizes meaning as hallmarks of a new theatre, the theatre of the “absurd.”