The thought of this sentence is nonsense. Not only is it paradoxical, it’s ridiculous. Such sets the stage for the play we saw last night at the Pearl. It was wacky. It was capricious. It was hilarious.
From the first scene, I knew this play was going to be eccentric. It was perhaps in that moment that Mr. Smith became my favor character. As his wife initiated banal conversation, Mr. Smith simply clucked his tongue in response. Initially his response did irritate me, but as I realized it was solely a part of Ionesco’s experimental language, I found it humorous. I’ll admit, while watching the play, and even immediately after its completion, I was at a loss of words, and a bit confused. But after reading the Director’s note (which I should have done from the start), I was able to appreciate the seemingly nonsensical play I had just seen.
By creating scenes where the characters spoke essentially in gibberish, and told monotonous stories, Ionesco satirizes the way in which we communicate with each other. I found this to be genius. It would have been one thing to simply state that humans don’t pay careful enough attention to each other, but by blatantly demonstrating this through the characters’ irrational behavior, one can realize how trivial some of the conversations we have in our daily lives truly are. One example that stood out to me was when Mr. and Mrs. Smith were arguing about the doorbell ringing. One stated that no one is EVER at the door when the bell is rung, and the other that there is ALWAYS someone at the door. While this argument is fairly simple, it was a beautiful example of how humans can’t ever seem to come to a middle ground, even when the solution is obvious.
There are many ways in which this play can speak to a New York audience. New Yorkers aren’t exactly known for their patience, and neither were the characters in this play. Continuing with the doorbell example, each time the bell rang, Mr. Smith looked at his wife, anticipating that she would answer it. She then proceeded to do so, at a painfully slow pace. At one point, I wanted to jump up and open the door for her. For New Yorkers, moving at such a pace is unacceptable. If you do so, you’re either a tourist, or extremely old. Another aspect that could be applied to a New York audience is how the characters seemed to have known each other for ages, yet knew nothing about each other. When Mr. and Mrs. Martin enter the scene, they don’t even seem aware that they live in the same household. While I was initially annoyed that they couldn’t realize the obvious fact that they are married, I later applied the same concept to my apartment building. While common sense tells me that five other families live in my building, I could only identify one or two of them if they were walking on the street. Perhaps this goes along with the fast pace of New York. The thought of taking the time to get to know my neighbors seems to be laborsome and too much of a nuisance. And this seemed to be the way the characters of this play felt about each other, since they only thought to talk about superficial events, which even they admitted to being boring.
