The Chairs and The Maids

Self-expression and originality are unquestionably accepted as good qualities in the theater. But a play that expresses the author's personal preoccupations in a hitherto unexplored way is not automatically a good one. Witness the modern French theatre: creative, introspective, and narrow.

Ionesco and Genet write for themselves. Almost incidentally they find an audience in the small intellectual cadre capable of identifying with their plights, and the bewildered, fashionable throng that will never challenge either the playwright's meaning or the Emperor's new clothes.

Ionesco builds to a simple, visual metaphor. Sometimes he becomes too involved in his blueprint and loses sight of the overall structure (as in The New Tenant). The same is true of Rhinoceros, but the brilliance of the plan itself is staggering. In The Chairs, finally, production outline, technique, and final product are equally brilliant.

Invisible Guests

The Chairs opens as a very old man and his admiring wife await a group of illustrious guests, coming to hear his parting Message. A professional orator has been hired to deliver the speech, which will summarize the old man's life-experience.

Soon the guests begin to arrive, but they are actually invisible. The wife brings ever more chairs as the two old people converse (one-sidedly) with their visitors, and eventually the room is filled with an illusory crowd peopling row upon row of real chairs. The nonagenarians are continually pushed back by the aisles of people/emptiness, until the man stands alone on what has become the stage of a vacant theater. As he else-where uses eggs or rhinoceroses, Ionesco here uses chairs to create a physical situation that dwarfs and isolates the individuals remaining on his stage.

When the orator finally enters, he is a real character. The man and his wife, satisfied that the message will be delivered, take their lives. The orator draws himself up, confronts both the empty and the actual theater before him, and finally gargles forth a few incoherent syllables. He is inarticulate.

No Communication

Instantly the entire statement has been made clear: there is no message. A lifetime's impressions cannot be neatly synopsized. And there is no audience: only hollow men, a worshiping wife, and a world of idiotically polite conservation. At the same time, Ionesco illustrates his own failure: the drama, to him, is an inadequate means of communication. The professional orator stands in the old man's way just as actors separate the playwright and his words (a fact of life Ionesco continually decries).

Nihilism is its own revenge after all. If you really want to say that writing plays is worthless, that the theater is a medium which only obstructs communication, that human experience cannot be displayed on a stage, you don't have to write a play to say it. You can wrte an essay or a poem or a novel or a letter to the CRIMSON.

Ionesco once revealed: "I try only to explain myself ...I have decided not to recognize any laws except those of my own imagination." It follows, since the great restriction of our time (as Ionesco sees it) is dogma, that the writer must declare his freedom from the ideological discipline most vociferously. And when he concludes that there is no Message, he does so with pride rather than despair. The process by which Ionesco's heroes are forced into aloneness by an encroaching world is (ironically) a victorious and heroic one. Their solitude is the glorification of their individualism.

Jean Genet

If Ionesco is the playwright of the man who stands alone contemplating the difficulty of human communication, Genet represents the man who has been kicked to the ground and lies screaming. Only it's not a man at all: it's a woman and a homoexual and a convict. For, like the Atheist of the joke who antagonizes his religious friends by saying: "Sure, I believe in an anthropomorphic God: she's a Negro," Genet warns that White Christian Civilization must face up to its outcasts.

The Maids concerns two servants who play out a dream-game whenever their mistress is absent. In the game one emulates the Mistress and the other plays the trainbearer who finally kills her superior. Always killing characters behind their masks, Genet screams that he is taking revenge.

But when a man screams for an hour and a half his voice loses its urgency, let alone its audibility. And Genet, for all his violence and class-consciousness, for all his loud identification with the poor, black, female, criminal, perverted oppressed underdog, is a thoroughly non-Revolutionary playwright. To him, all change is sham (as in the Balcony where the victorious insurrectionaries return to the brothel with a set of illusions sicker than those of the ousted eminences). Genet's underdogs do not want to seize the world and change it; they only want to reverse its order. His Blacks want to oppress the whites, his servants want to be masters. Revolution is a violent process, but it has its own subtlely. Genet has none.

One for Two

Both Genet and Ionesco are admittedly ill at case with the dramatic illusion. So it is more than coincidental that both explore the possibilities of the play within the play, and make stringent demands on their actors. In The Chairs, Stanley Jay and Mary Alice Bayth do a superb job, turning emptiness into a tangible reality. Had this standard been sustained after intermission, much might have been done to put M. Genet's poetry into context and to make his fury more comprehensible. Sylvia Gassel, though, could not innoculate her long, apocalyptic soliloquies with meaning, and the audience lapsed from confusion into boredom.

One for the price of two is what the Charles has to offer this months. Maybe the ticket girl can be cajoled into some deal where she admits those who swear to leave at intermission for half price. But the production of Ionesco should really not be bypassed; it's exciting theater.