I went to watch “The Bald Soprano”. I saw “The Bald Soprano”. I left the theatre of “The Bald Soprano”. Quite honestly, I came out with absolutely nothing initially watching this play. When I first entered the theatre, I was really surprised to see that the theatre was so small and that we were sitting so up close to the actors. I have never been in an environment like this where you are up close with all the actors so I thought this was going to be a deep and meaningful experience for me, instead, I felt completely indifferent coming out of the play because I was just completely clueless about what I had just seen. Nothing made sense to me, from beginning to end. At times, I found the play hard to pay attention to because I just found it so boring while the jokes they were making were unappealing. Sometimes I just took a cursory glance around the audience and saw all these elderly people laughing and wondered why they were laughing. I found the jokes uninteresting and not appealing to me. The actors completely illogical arguments dumbfounded me even farther. I thought, “What’s the point of this play?” but I couldn’t find any answer. The ridiculous scene where you had all of the characters screaming and hollering at each other with random indiscernible comments confused me even farther and even frustrated me at times. Then after that, I saw that the play was starting over again and then I pretty much stopped paying attention because I thought they were going to replay the whole thing again for no apparent reason. Simply put, I thought that the play was just completely pointless and idiotic until… our class discussion on Monday.
After Monday’s class discussion, I finally realized that the play was meant to be the way it was. It was supposed to be trivial and nonsensical which is the way Ionesco satirizes the upper middle class. Ionesco was trying to show the pointlessness of the colloquial ways we use language. He was also satirizing the middle class and how they are preoccupied by trivial aspects of their lives that shouldn’t be important like if when someone knocks on the door, is there always somebody there or is there never anybody there. Even though I now do understand Ionesco’s true intention in writing the play and give him credit, I believe that it should be more evident to the audience what Ionesco’s intention was because I found it pretty hard to discern.
Other then the play itself, I found everything else quite interesting even though I was sitting on the side and found it hard to see the opening scene between Mr. and Mrs. Smith because Mrs. Smith was in the way. The actors and actresses really were into their roles and you could see the passion they had. The set was also designed to stimulate your senses because you could see that the sky was actually on the floor instead of in the sky which made you wonder why the set designer made it like that.
All in all, even though I initially wasn’t at all impressed by this play, I came to realize the true significance of the play started to appreciate it more (but definitely not the jokes).
