Oui, Non, Moi

The curtain went up last week at off-Broadway's Theater de Lys, and there on the stage--in a play called The Shepherd's Chameleon, by French Playwright Eugene Ionesco--was an actor playing a character called Ionesco, a playwright at work on a play called The Shepherd's Chameleon. Three more characters, each called Bartholomeus, turned up and began to unravel funny skeins of academic pedantry in argument with the playwright.

All this was no surprise to those who came expecting to be surprised, as any Ionesco audience must. It was a kind of Left Bank version of Author Meets the Critics, a personal attack on critics in dramatic form. The three critical Barts filled the hall with pretentious polysyllables, spoke of "costumology," "historicization" and "decorology," told "Ionesco" that he had "points of view with no optical instrument," knowledgeably mentioned "the Being of not-Being and the Not-Being of Being in the Know." For his part, the hero finally turned to the audience and stated his case: "I blame these doctors for discovering elementary truths and dressing them up in exaggerated language so that these elementary truths appear to have gone mad . . . The critic should describe, and not prescribe . . ."

Wisdom for Mankind. The curtain went down, soon went up again, and there on the stage was Eugene Ionesco himself, a Rumanian-born French citizen who answers the frequent charge that the bizarre (e.g., three-nosed) characters in his plays "come from nowhere" by saying that "they come from Everywhere." Through an interpreter he solemnly told his audience that the surrealists "nourished me," but that the three biggest influences on his work were actually Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx. Answering written questions from the house, he picked up a cold potato that went "Do you think that the modern dramatic artist is essentially alienated?", thought it over and gave a perfect, two-syllable answer: "Oui, non."

Anti-intellectual, full of theatrical prankishness and a fondness for humanity that is edged in bitterness, Eugene Ionesco, with Jean Genet (The Balcony) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), is one of the main forces in what he calls the School of Paris and most people call the avant-garde theater. From an obscure job in a firm publishing legal books, he emerged ten years ago at the age of 38 to begin writing theatrical works that were generally called obscure too. But like Genet and Beckett, he has expressed his themes less in dialogue than in the structure of his plays, often preoccupied with the frustrating inadequacies of human communication. In The Lesson a teacher who has tried to instruct 39 inept students, murdering each one when the effort failed, murders No. 40 onstage. In The Chairs an aged couple takes leave of the world through a window, leaving behind an Orator appointed to deliver their final message of wisdom for mankind; but the Orator is an inarticulate idiot.

Enemy of Dogmatism. In The Shepherd's Chameleon he achieved many of his funniest lines by lifting them verbatim from reviews of his earlier plays, has one critic say of "Ionesco": "He hasn't been accepted by the commercial theater yet. That makes him dangerous." By that standard Ionesco himself is no longer dangerous. Although his off-Broadway appearance last week was at the American National Theater and Academy's one-shot matinee series ("designed to present productions which do not, cannot, or might not find ready acceptance by the existing commercial theater producers"), Ionesco's play The Rhinoceros will be produced next month on Broadway, starring Eli Wallach. Everyone in it turns into a rhinoceros, except the one character who remains an enemy of dogmatism, who refuses to permit any ideology to maderize in his mind until it becomes idolatry.

Perhaps Ionesco has caught up with his audience, or perhaps his audience has caught up with him. At any rate, since it is as clear and pointed as a rhino's horn, his new play may cause American theatergoers to agree with Eugene Ionesco's ready answer when he is asked to name his favorite contemporary playwright. He gently replies, "Moi."

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