Introduction

The present thesis “The American Absurd Theatre with Special

Reference to Edward Albee” deals with the Theatre of the Absurd with a

particular reference to Edward Albee’s plays.

The first chapter “The Theatre of the Absurd” is a critical survey of

the absurd theatre in the West. It begins with a general ideology that the

modem times with heartless mechanization led to the meaningless in life.

This meaningless or incongruous may range from the sense of waiting to

that of terrorism. The absurd has its own features. The absurd drama

depicts the absurd in life. Secondly it does not appropriate the amount of

the traditional ingredients of plot, characterization, dialogue and the like.

Thirdly the absurd drama makes little use of language. Fourthly it presents

the mannerisms. Finally it has incoherent babbling on the stage.

The absurd theatre is not a 20th century phenomenon. It has its

antecedents dating back to the ancient Greek literature.

Martin Esslin traces how the Theatre of the Absurd evolved with

different genres in different times and cultures. He thinks the absurd is

based on folklore forms like jugglery, acrobatics, circus, revue, mimes,

bullfighting, clowning, fooling, mad scenes, nonsense and fantasy.

Commedia dell’arte is one such medieval Italian source for the

absurd play. Commedia dell’arte is a kind of drama in which the actors

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acted according to the situation and the dialogues are based on it as there

was no written script. They improvised the dialogues. They had stock

characters of comic indulgence in multifarious forms of incongruous

semantic speculation and verbal misunderstanding. The actors Chaplin and

Keaton are the perfect embodiments of man's stoicism. Nevertheless, they

got off the hand, when they faced the world with mechanical device and

lost its tempo and fantasy. Although it influenced the Theatre of the Absurd

with actors like Laurel and Hardy.

The Nonsense literature was yet another source of the absurd theatre.

Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were such rare poets who wrote it. Their

poetry is full of nonsense and one can see it in the work of Elizabeth

Sewell The Field ofNonsense.

In the field of prose, it is too large as it started from Laurence Sterne

to the aphorisms of Lichenberg, from Charles Nodier to Mark Twain and

Ambrose Bierce. There is also delightful nonsense playlet of Ring Lardner,

as he belonged to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. S.J.Perelman is an American

practitioner of nonsense prose, who wrote dialogues for Marx Brothers’

films. This directly influenced the Theatre of the Absurd.

The literature of dream started with utopian ideas which are always

in allegorical nature. Some of these works are Aesop’s Fables, Arabian

Nights, The Decamrion, Beowulf, Morte D’Arthur, Plowman’s 4P’s,

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Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress, and William Blake’s

Prophetic Visions. A playwright uses reality and dreamlike world.

Further, a decline of allegorical writings led to the dominance of

fantasy in literature especially in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels and

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The masters of the genre are E.T.A.

Hoffman, Gerard de Nerval and Barbey d’Aurevilly.

Moreover, the movement, which led to the development of

naturalism, was the psychological subjectivism that manifested in

Strindberg’s expressionist dream plays.

In the Middle Ages, dream, allegories and the baroque plays

expressed the stability in the accepted belief. Thus, that led concretized

thought by acknowledging myths of their age. In the same fashion, the

influence of Franz Kafka on the Theatre of the Absurd is more powerful as

that of Strindberg and Joyce.

The tradition of absurd theatre was further developed by the

iconoclasts Alfred Jerry, Apollinaire, the Dadaists, some of the German

Expressionists, the Surrealists and the prophets of the theatre of Cruelty.

The Dada movement began in Zurich and spread to all the central

European countries. The word 'Dada' means ‘hobby horse.’ The aim of the

Dadaists was the destruction of art, or at least the conventional art of the

bourgeois era that had produced the horrors of war. The Dadaist group

consists of members like Tristan Tzara, Ruminian Poch and others. Hugo

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Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp and Marcel Janco

were the founder members of the movement.

The Expressionist movement became too idealistic and politically

conscious which ranked as the forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Yvan Goll was a dramatist during his Expressionist Dadaist period, and

under the influence of Jarry and Apollinaire he wrote Die Chaplinade.

Bertolt Brecht was another German playwright who wrote in the form of

expression. In France, Dadaism continued with a different approach as it

had come under the influence of surrealism.

Louis Aragon and Andre Breton contributed for surrealist plays.

Even the attempts were made to break the convention of naturalistic theatre

outside the surrealist movement. Jean Cocteau experimented with the

theatre of Pure Movement.

Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Roger Gilbert Lacombe had during

their school days, composed a series of playlets in Jarryesque spirit which

was published by College de Pataphysique with the title Petit Theatre.

These playlets were nonsense and beyond interpretation.

There is a close link between literature and painting and sculpture

from Apollinaire to the surrealists. It is said surrealistic paintings of Miro,

Tanguy and Dali unravel the mysteries of the subconscious mind and they

recreate the fascinating panorama of the inner world. Ernst Barlach is the

great German Expressionist sculptor, who wrote many plays that

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anticipated some of dreamlike, mythical features of the Theatre of the

Absurd. The modem movement in painting and the Theatre of the Absurd

met in their rejection of the discursive and narrative elements. In Spain,

some tendencies of the surrealists found their literary parallels in the works

of two important dramatists. Ramon del Ville-Inclan developed a style of

dramatic writing called esperpento (the grotesque or ridiculous). Valle-

Inclan explained that the artist sees the world from three different angles. It

is said,

He can look upwards, as if on his knees before it and present an

idealized, reverent picture of reality; he can confront it standing on the

same level, which will lead to realistic approach, ... or he can see world

from above and from this distant vantage point it will appear ridiculous and

absurd, for it will be seen as through the eyes of a dead man who looks

back on life.”1

In English, the influence of Dadaism and Surrealism is less seen.

Gertrude Stein has written many pieces and she calls them as plays. In

Scott Fitzgerald’s play Vegetable the dramatist portrays life by giving a

grotesque nonsense version. E.E. Cummings’ play Him (1927) is a

surrealist play.

The world now has turned out to be meaningless and absurd has

prevailed with disjointed accepted integrated principle. All these are

confronted as if they were deprived from the purpose of living life, which

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once had a living principle. All this happened because of Nietzsche’s Thus

Spake Zarathrustra, which pointed the death of God. In addition to this,

another effect is of science and industrialization, which made man suffer

from economic and social grounds. This has led many repercussions

leading to World Wars.

Initially the Theatre of the Absurd has two-fold meaning - one is

satirical presentation and the other is based on irreligious life, which made

man lose the meaning of life.

The Theatre of the Absurd presents life without any accepted norms.

In showing this, the plays carry the post-modernistic thoughts with harsh

truth by showing the depths of man's personality, dreams, fantasies and

nightmares.

Language is a medium of expression of thought, and communication

takes place when perception is expressed in the form of words. Though

words do not carry meaning, the meaning is there in thoughts and in the

mind of the recipient. Similarly, the dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd

select those words, which create ambiguity and show man's intuition.

Hence, the language in the Theatre of the Absurd is devalued, as the

characters in the play try to communicate with an undissolved totality of

perception based on man's intuition.

The use of alienation effect helps the dramatists of the absurd for

presentation. Suddenly confronting situations, which make them involve in

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knowing about the meaning of poetic image and it is presented in the

grotesque manner and situation. The Theatre of the Absurd presents the

disintegrated world, which has lost a unifying principle, its meaning and

purpose in the absurd universe.

The Theatre of the Absurd shows the reality, which is expressed

through images with outward projection of human mind, fears, dreams,

nightmares and conflicts within the personality of the author.

The main practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd are many

playwrights.

Samuel Beckett was an Irish-French poet, critic, novelist and

dramatist. He was bom near Dublin in 1906 to middle class protestant

parents. He started his career as a critic, and then turned to write poems and

novels. Nevertheless, he became famous as a dramatist with the play

Waiting for Godot. This play brought him name and fame, and all of a

sudden, he turned out to be a prominent personality. Beckett’s plays with

existential theme have several stages of development. In Waiting for Godot

Vladmir and Estragon are waiting for some supernatural person to come

and take away their problems from their miserable kind of existence as

Christ has done earlier by giving a meaning to life. Or in other words, they

are waiting for Christ's second coming. Throughout the ages, human beings

are waiting for some sort of help from the external agency or super human

being. Nevertheless, life moves on without any such help.

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 Eugene Ionesco is one of the prominent dramatists. His plays are

understandable as they try to exhibit the rejection of the established order

and reason. He wrote plays on current issues, especially of Nazism, day-

to-day activities and on communication. In contrast to Sartre and Brecht,

Ionesco is opposed to ideological plays. He is non-commitant. In his Bald

Soprano Ionesco shows the meaningless in the life, hollowness in

relationship and an image of man in society. In "Rhinoceros, Berenger turns

out to be a rhinoceros at the end of the play as he faces more difficulty in

adjusting with the people, who have already turned out to be rhinoceros as

the Nazis fascism.

Arthur Adamov is another prominent personality who has

contributed for the shaping of the idiom of the stage. He is not only a great

dramatist but also a remarkable thinker. Adamov's writings exhibit the

fearfulness, nightmareness, meaningless isolation, alienation and

senselessness, which he has experienced in his early life. Adamov's play

Ping-pong is one of the masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Jean Genet is a French poet, novelist and dramatist. His writings

have given a new light in existential discipline as he points an idea about

the self and individuality. His play The Maids is in Pirandello's model.

Genet shows the difference between reality and acting in play-acting.

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 Harold Pinter is a British dramatist, who emerged in the period of

New Wave Theatre. Instead, he wrote the early plays on the absurdity of

man. John Russell Talyor observes,

It would, admittedly, be absurd to look in Pinter’s work for a philosophical

system or ideas which can be taken out of context and considered on their

own independent merits.”2

In The Birthday Party, Pinter uses his theme of fear. Here the fear

makes the persons reside at the resort and from resort, he is taken away for

his sins and made aware of his duties. Pinter is a post-modern dramatist. In

his plays, postmodern elements are seen as most of them have more

meanings and there is no central thought.

There are many other dramatists in Europe. Martin Esslin draws a

list of dramatists who were experimenting in theatre, but stood on grounds

as parallel to other dramatists. There were dramatists influenced by

Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Adamov and Pinter. Though these stand as

contemporaries, they have contributed for the new theatre either with

psychological or narrative elements, by refuting the traditional convention.

Jean Tardieu’s dramatic experience is seen with his publication of

two volumes Theatre de Chambre (1955) and Poems a Jouer. In Exu Seu’s

Le Savent, Tardieu aims to present plotless and innovative theatre. Boris

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Vian’s Les Batisseurs d’ Empire shows a direct influence of Ionesco. Dino

Buzzati’s Un Caso Clinico is based on miracle plays. E. Zio D’Ericco is an

Italian. His one play is II Formicaio (The Anthill). Manuel de Pedrolo is a

Latin dramatist whose dream and absurdity are hard. Fernando Arrabal’s

plays are not based on meaninglessness of life, but they are based on

childlike simplicity, which is unable to understand the moral world as they

are presented with cruelty. Max Frisch’s play Biedermann und die

Brandstifter (Biedermann and the Incendiaries) is based on sardonic

commentary on contemporary political phenomenon. Wolfang

Hildesheimer is the practitioner of the Theatre of the Absurd in Germany.

Three of his plays are modem parables of life without any hope. Gunter

Grass is a German dramatist who uses rougher texture in plays. Robert

Pinget’s Letter Morte {Deal Letter) reminds his novel Le Fiston. Norman

Frederick Simpson’s works are more philosophical in nature as they are

based on reality and the world of suburban is shown in his plays. In A

Resounding Tinkle, the dramatist has mingled the nonsense and states it

with parody for philosophical intent to exhibit meaninglessness. His best

play is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It is a modernized

(adopted) version of Hamlet, a play by Shakespeare. There is no logic or

reasoning. It is based on word game.

The influence of Ionesco has changed some of the political

dramatists to write on this aspect in eastern European countries like Poland.

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Kafka’s influence is seen in many of the literary works, Slowomir Mrozek

is an avant-garde dramatist. Vaclav Havel’s play Zahradni Slavnost (The

Garden Party) is a political satire based on humour and Kafkesque depth.

There are differences between European and American Absurd

Theatre. There is a cultural difference between European and American

traditions and customs in response to life and literature. Literature is a

superstructure on which cultural patterns inform the base.In the 1920’s and

30’s, many dramatists were influenced by the World War I and

urbanization which made them feel life as absurd and they began to exhibit

a sense of the absurd in their works. The Americans are strong in their

cultural roots and this makes them nationally stronger. This cultural context

creates a kind of ethos. This comes in the form of dream or myth.

American life depends upon American dream. The American dramatists

use this element in deconstructing the narrative that is, metanarrative, a

post modem concept. It is called ‘metatheatre’ by Lionel Albee. American

dream is an optimistic philosophy which pervaded American life. Edward

Albee pointed out that the purpose of the Theatre of the Absurd is an

absorption in art of certain existential and post-existential philosophical

concepts having to do, in the main, with man’s attempts to make sense for

himself out of his senselessness position in the world, because the moral,

religious, political and social structures have collapsed. This view shows

that man's dream has collapsed. A kind of delusion towards the dream has

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started more in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The optimistic ideal of American

dream collapsed with the assassination of John Kennedy, Martin Luther

King Jr, the event of Vietnam War and many other social policies affecting

the faith in American life. These brought the change in social and political

scenario. The human being as the individual is looked as nothing. His

feelings are repressed and he is removed from social life which Americans

dreamt for it once. Therefore, American playwrights concentrate on social

aspects of man which looked once as to build a good social set up. The

feelings of human beings are repressed because of disillusionment of the

dream and the optimistic culture began to disintegrate.

American dramatists write just like the European dramatists. They

try to present the delusion of American dream. American playwrights

present their plays with serious subjects without any comic element in the

plot. Neither they have taken the grotesque nor dreamlike settings. The

tragic situation comes to show the issue which the playwright wants to

show in regard to American myth as it is based on cultural codes.

Therefore, the Theatre of the Absurd in Europe and America attack

optimistic nature. It is not preaching any dark things of reality, but it

presents the reality of senselessness of life in terms of morality and culture.

This brings the main difference on the philosophical aspects of life in

America and Europe. American life is based on dream and this is not there

in European life.
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 The American female has overthrown the male dominance in the

autonomy. This type of psychosis is seen in Albee's plays American Dream

and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This can be seen in others' work also.

Robert Hivnor's plays are compared with Ionesco's in their imagination and

fantasy. Carson McCullers is the best-known novelist in her twenties.

Murray Schisgal is an American playwright known for his comedy LUV.

Neil Simon is known for his Absurd plays. In the short span of her career,

Lorraine Hansberry was acclaimed by the critics as one of the best

dramatists of the 20th century with success of her plays. A Raisin in the Sun

and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window are masterpieces. A Raisin in

the Sun is a play about human beings who want to preserve family pride on

the one hand, and on the other hand to erase the poverty that seems to be

their fate. Maria Irene Fomes is the 1960's avant-grade dramatist. The

surralisimatic elements of Beckett's writing influenced Fomes in early

plays. Bmce Jay Friedman’s plays are linked with black humorists of the

1960’s. Michael McClure as an American playwright is concerned with

communication. Megan Terry is an experimental dramatist known for her

bold improvisation. Jack Gelber denies the illusion of the stage and merges

the actors and the audience to create a reality in which pretense is

presumably unnecessary. His best play is The Connection in which he

depicts drug culture. Imamu Amiri Baraka was formerly known as Le Rio

Jones having rejected white values and society. He strives to create art with

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a firm didactive purpose as he reflects the value and sensibility of the black

community. His Dutchman is set in a subway car. This one act play centres

on the chance of encounter of a young black man Clay and a white woman,

Lula. There three themes sex, violence and facial conflict are set down.

Jack Richardson is an American dramatist known for his existential plays

in the 1960’s. Kenneth Brown is a playwright who presents a new mode of

dramatic communication on the stage. John Gaure is a playwright who is

compared with Albee as well as with those who make the Theatre of the

Absurd. Gaure uses exaggeration, shock, ludicrousness and black humor.

Muzzeka is a social tragedy of an individual. Marco Polo sings a solo. The

Cop Out brings post-pop art sense that has so vitalized correct art and

music. Arthur Kopit is a playwright with a vision of America's corruption

to the roots. It is said, "With these central motifs Kopit’s work has moved

restlessly across a spectrum of private and public symbols, archetypes and

mythologies.”3 Lanford Wilson’s plays are performed often. The labels

'poetic realist' and 'American realist' have been applied to Wilson. Israel

Horovitz’s darkly psychological Wakefield cycle retains essential stylistic

traits- a super ear for dialogue, social consciousness, theatrical

inventiveness and combination of force and seriousness. Terrence

McNally's plays are classified as satire, farce and melodrama. Sam Shepard

is considered the foremost dramatist for the off-Broadway. He has written

forty one act and full length plays which convey a surrealistic vision of

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contemporary American society. David Mamet's plays reflect a wry sense

of humor and their dramatic language is often obscene. He finds loneliness

and fear in the American culture.

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 References:

1. Martin Esslin. The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 395-396.

2. John Russell Taylor. Harold Pinter. Essex : Longman Group Ltd, 1969,

p.5.

3. William Herman. Understanding Contemporary Drama. Columbia :

University of South Carolina Press, 1987. p. 236.

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