Our production of Edward Albee’s The Play About The Baby opens tomorrow in the Chopin Studio Theatre. One word you will not see in any publicity materials surrounding our upcoming production is “absurd.” Or “absurdism.” Or “absurdist.” The Theatre of The Absurd is an academic term that attempts to classify certain plays and playwrights that resist such classification. The notion of such a classification is counterproductive and is itself . . . well, absurd. To make things worse, the term seems to organize or even dictate an audience’s reaction to one of these plays far in advance of the actual experience of it. And truthfully? Most contemporary, non-academic audiences will avoid “absurdist” plays like the plague, mistakenly believing that “absurdist” means impossible to understand or, even worse, impossible to enjoy which, of course, is unfortunate and simply untrue.
Albee’s plays are indeed challenging: they challenge an audiences expectation of what happens when you walk into a theatre. The plays challenge the traditional notions of dramatic narrative, of good and evil, of comedy and drama. When pressed to answer the question “do you consider your plays to be comedies or dramas?” the playwright simply says “I consider them to be plays.”
A non-industry friend of mine asked me if The Play About the Baby could actually be part of an enjoyable night on the town. My reaction? “Hell yes.“ True, The Play About The Baby is a strange play, and like all of Albee’s plays, it has dark rumblings beneath its surface. But it is also deeply funny, playfully sexy, full of wonder and mystery and high-paced vaudevillian humor that pulses with both the joy of life and the sweet misery of the broken heart.
There is nothing absurd about that.
Matthew Reeder
Artistic Director
Deliberately fighting against labels simply argues the case that a new label *may* be needed.
Creating a new label to describe a creative work that deviates from traditional forms isn’t an attack against the work, merely an acknowledgment of the work’s success at breaking from the mainstream. The play marginalizes itself, the label comes after the fact.
Apples are popular for a reason. If an orange truly is not the same as an apple, it will be the marketplace that decides whether there is a place for that orange.
Cynic, I certainly understand your point.
However, people have come to assume that theater of the absurd is a rather stylistically specific genre, rather than the highly fragmented and variant group that it is. This makes people think they know that such a play is not an apple or orange, but rather a kumquat, and since they don’t like kumquats…
But there is far more variety to be found under this label than in a bag of kumquats. This play isn’t a kumquat anymore than it is an apple or an orange. It has some commonality with other Albee work, and it has some commonality with Beckett. But you can describe more points of difference than points of similarity.