Thtr Wkshp:Absurdist Comedy

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

From the late 16th century until WWII (1939-45), there existed a consensus on the basic features of drama in Western culture: it had a fairly linear plot and verisimilar characters (that is, plausible rather than realistic), all predicated in the belief that the world and human life made sense. After the horrors of the war, however, a powerful trend emerged towards regarding the world and human existence as absurd, and nowhere was this movement more developed than in 1950s France. New playwrights emerged who would dramatize the absurdist view of human existence through comedy; in so doing, they also completely reinvented the genre with a focus on deconstructing conventional dramatic form. Initially, spectators were often puzzled, frustrated, sometimes even infuriated when confronted with such plays; but in time, avant-garde writing and performing would become the new norm, and these "scandalous" plays turn into revered classics. Today we can really only understand plays from this period through performance, by studying the conditions in which they were staged, by seeing them staged or, better yet, by performing them ourselves. Yet performing these plays still poses an interesting challenge since they essentially ignore the logic of plot (a sequence of events that are somewhat connected by rationally determined links, such as causality) and characterization based on psychological motivation.