“Silly, silly, silly. This is getting far too silly”—this is what Monty Python’s Colonel would have said about The Bald Soprano. I would have to say that I agree with him; although I did enjoy the play overall and thought that the actors gave great performances, I felt that the comedy of the play was sometimes pushed to the point of being annoying.
First let me say that I’m actually a big fan of absurdist comedies, particularly British humor (or would that be humour?), like the aforementioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I’ve also enjoyed reading plays from the Theatre of the Absurd, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Waiting For Godot. I personally like the fact that because the events of these comedies generally don’t make sense, they highlight the absurdity found in every day life. One of my all-time favorite shows, Arrested Development, is quite simply about insane people doing insane things (it’s also where the title of this post comes from…I felt the need to do it). Based on what I’ve just said, I should’ve loved The Bald Soprano. So why didn’t I?
The answer to that question is actually pretty simple—there’s only so much absurdity I can take. To me, a joke stops being funny and becomes irritating when it’s repeated over and over again with little to no variation. Case in point—at the very beginning, Mr. Smith’s disinterested tongue-clicking in response to his wife was funny the first few times, but became progressively less so as the scene went on. The same went for the good minute of awkward silence between the Smiths and the Martins, which was funny for about 15 seconds but then became rather awkward for the audience as well. The interaction between the Martins and the scene with the doorbell came very close to being irritating, but Eugene Ianesco wrote in enough variety for them to remain generally fresh (it also helped that the actors were very good at selling the absurdity). But perhaps this is what Ianesco was hoping to do to me—perhaps he wanted me to get frustrated to show just how useless language can be; in daily life people’s conversations generally are pretty repetitive, which the actors definitely reflected.
Speaking of the actors—I really thought they were fantastic. A play so packed with non-sequiturs and ridiculous storylines could collapse under the weight of its own absurdity, but the actors played their characters like they really believed in what they were saying. The women in particular were excellent at selling their characters; it can’t be easy to stay in character when the words coming out of your mouth are so ridiculous.
As for how this play spoke to a New York audience—although I’m not entirely certain, to me it mainly spoke of the absurdity of the world we live in. One of the first things I noticed was that the floor was painted to look like the sky, which I felt really set the tone that the play was in a topsy-turvy world. Perhaps Ianesco’s intention for writing this play was to show that even though we generally like to believe that we are all individuals, he believes anyone could be substituted into our lives because of the way we submit to the expectations of society—the Smiths and the Martins make sure to act in the “proper” British way and the play ends the exact same way it began, with a rather unimportant conversation about dinner, only with the Martins speaking the Smiths’ dialogue.
