For the past two weeks, the Tech Theater Company has performed a rather different style of play. Theater of the Absurd was the theme as the Company put on two of the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s one-act plays: The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. The Company had been rehearsing the plays since the first week of school, according to actress Lauren Dedow, who played the part of the maid in The Lesson. The plays attracted a fair amount of interest: as of the third performance over one hundred people had attended, and even more attended the remaining performances.
The Bald Soprano was the first play to be performed. One of the most-performed plays in France, and holding a record for the greatest number of interpretations, The Bald Soprano showcases an evening of a stylized British couple and their guests for the night. The play is notable for its non-sequiturs and nonsensical dialogue, including a line how the characters “ate our British salad” and “drank our British water,” and an infamous scene in which the characters discuss multiple individuals named Bobby Watson, without ever seeming to notice the absurdity of having so many people all named Bobby Watson. The play also took the interesting step of displaying certain stage directions on a screen above the stage, which allowed the audience to see how the stage directions further tied into the theme (“The clock strikes seventeen British strokes”).
Following a ten-minute intermission, the performance resumed with The Lesson. In contrast to The Bald Soprano, which primarily focuses on the humor in absurdity, The Lesson explores the dark side of the absurd. The story of a professor taking on an eager new pupil, the play initially seems to be another absurd-humor play as the gaps in the student’s education become apparent. Yet, as the play goes on, the professor’s reactions become increasingly disturbed, and the play becomes increasingly dark, until the very end, which results in a twist ending that exemplifies the concept of the Theater of the Absurd.
Overall, the performances went fairly well. There were certainly a few minor issues, such as the fake English accents of the actors’ in The Bald Soprano occasionally slipping, but they did not generally detract too much from the quality of the performance.
The Tech Theater Company’s next performance will be Vaster than Empires, a collection of stories by science-fiction writer Ursula K LeGuin. It will be shown Nov. 12-14.