http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/theater/2002645/review-the-bald-soprano
In the late 1940s, Eugène Ionesco’s sense of humor was piqued by a primer he was using to learn English. The banality of the lessons’ sample dialogue—the coldness of the expository communication between married couples, for example—inspired him to write his first play, 1950’s The Bald Soprano, in which a veddy English couple entertains another veddy English couple in their veddy English home. At first, their conversations are merely stuffy and formal; then they become a hash of contradictions, non sequiturs and absurdly precipitous changes of mood. The middle-class English drawing room is recast as a formalist fun house in which language is unhinged from communication, and logic from reality.
Echoes of Ionesco’s extended neo–Dadaist sketch have been heard since in everything from Monty Python to Steve Martin and beyond, and it retains a strong comic voice even today. But the cartoonishness of The Bald Soprano’s style is hard to limn right. Hal Brooks’s production at the Pearl Theatre Company is handsomely appointed—the upside-down china and photographs of Harry Feiner’s set are a nice touch—and earns several good laughs. Although the cast of six performs credibly throughout, however, only Rachel Botchan’s Mrs. Smith seems completely at ease in Ionesco’s zone. And despite Brooks’s efforts to keep the stage active, the show loses comic momentum as it drives toward the verbal disintegration of its finale. When it should be veering madly off the road, the amusement shifts to park.
