Our Lives Are So Similar. Oh, We’re Married!
Kenneth Tynan was among the first English critics to recognize how influential Eugène Ionesco was going to be, and one of the first to panic about it.
Tynan famously worried that Ionesco’s assault on realism did not engage with the world and that his popularity would lead theater down a blind alley. In his original 1956 review of “The Bald Soprano” he recognizes it as a masterpiece, but tellingly does not rave about its formal daring or snarky portrait of bourgeois rituals. Tynan makes the play sound like a riotous comedy.
He would have liked the Pearl Theater’s giddy slingshot of a production, staged with precise, farcical timing by Hal Brooks. Ionesco, of course, did not lead down an alley so much as open up new artistic vistas explored by writers like Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee. So in an age when departing from realism doesn’t seem so avant-garde anymore, this production treats the short play as an old-fashioned farce about two couples lost in their own heads.
Harry Feiner’s living room set has the eerie, symmetrical design of a frame from a Stanley Kubrick movie. The bowler on the hat rack is a nod to Beckett, and the clouds on the blue carpet indicate that this world is upside down.
Mrs. Smith (a chipper Rachel Botchan) rambles on in small talk, while with mock gravitas her husband (Bradford Cover) clicks his tongue in response. In the next scene a second couple (played with verve and wide-eyed innocence by Brad Heberlee and Jolly Abraham) marvel at the things they have in common before realizing they are married.
The play satirizes a kind of middle-class, suburban banality, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. Its famously off-kilter exchange of pleasantries is a mockery of logic, appearing like small talk but then veering off course into random nonsense. A reference to Sherlock Holmes underlines its challenge to rationality to explain the world. But mostly the musical banter of the dialogue in this staging is deliriously silly fun, starting with a rat-a-tat-tat sound of a bubble-gum pop song before accelerating into a punk rock mess.
In this production the play seems lighter, less derisive. This “Bald Soprano” taps into a simple, innocent humor that at its best captures the delight of watching a toddler learning how to talk.
