Anatomy of the Absurd

About five minutes after an off-Broadway play called The Apple, by Jack Gelber, begins, a character picks up a spatula, slings blobs of paint at a transparent plastic canvas, and then kneads the goo together with a rolling pin. Peering around this cunningly messy parody of abstract art with a confiding leer, the actor announces to the playgoers: "I'll admit why I'm here--therapy."

In this far-out play, the therapeutic verges on the emetic. A homosexual dances with a spastic, coyly protests: "No, you can't take your clothes off. Absolutely not!" A man in a gaudy African headdress wheels on an outsize baby stroller containing an intricately entwined couple and shouts: "Doctor! Doctor! Two of my villagers are stuck together!" The critics were not amused ("nightmarish frenzy"; "vast perversity"), but the vigor of their responses suggests that 29-year-old Playwright Gelber has touched some exposed nerve ends of the contemporary scene as he did in his first play about dope addicts, The Connection. Gelber likes to break the neck off the bottle of experience and jab the audience with the jagged edges, including several unhousebroken words. The result may not be drama, but it is the season's liveliest theatrical conversation piece.

The Fall & the Fallout. The Apple is a sample, not the best, or the worst, of an avant-garde movement that has been called "the theater of the absurd." It is a school whose major defect stems from its chief virtue: it fashions hypnotic images of disorder to convey the sense of a disordered world. But the essence of dramatic art, as of all art, is to impose order on chaos. Flawed, shapeless, often inarticulate, the theater of the absurd nonetheless does generate excitement. In its surreal, evocative way, it tries to grapple with the way things are now, with the current condition of man, the creature of the Fall and the fallout.

It is an image of man seen in a distorting fun-house mirror, and from Paris to Tokyo, from Buenos Aires to Manhattan, the small, unconventional stages of the world are reflecting it. In these plays, the bizarre is the norm. There is a woman with three noses, a family whose every member is named Bobby Watson. Sometimes the absurdity is purely verbal: "The small of my back is too big, Doctor." More often it is physical, macabre and symbolic. Two men try to measure a corridor only to find that their measuring tapes are blank. A couple have a growing corpse in the next room, and its huge foot finally pops open the interconnecting door. Later, it becomes a balloon and floats away. A prancing prostitute wears a pony tail where a pony does, making her the first whorse in theatrical history. She is a relatively soothing vision compared with the whore seen through a keyhole who discards her clothes and then removes her cheeks, her eyes, and the rest of her body down to the skeleton.

Ubu Plus Godot. In view of its calculated mystifications, it may seem a trifle absurd to argue that this school of playwriting is seriously engaged in a radical criticism of the modern world and in a religious quest for the meaning of man. But in a provocative new book (The Theatre of the Absurd; Anchor Books; $1.45), Critic Martin Esslin argues just that and does it convincingly.

In sifting Esslin's text, three significant plays emerge as historic steps in the development of absurd theater. The first was Ubu Roi, performed in Paris in 1896, and written by Alfred Jarry, a 23-year-old bourgeois baiter. Ubu is a pear-shaped buffoon-monster and a travesty on middle class values, e.g., thrift, family life, patriotism. He punctuates every third line of dialogue with an excremental word. Ubu Roi furnished the absurdists with their basic attitude: shock the bourgeoisie and slam the Establishment. In a 1923 play, In the Jungle of the Cities, Bertolt Brecht furnished the theater of the absurd with its basic theme. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a fierce but motiveless contest, and Shlink tries to sum it up: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice . . . so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible." Although Brecht abandoned the theater of the absurd for social protest, his isolation theme has been endlessly restated by the absurdists in terms of man's inability to communicate with, and relate to, his fellow man. In 1952, in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett defined the assumption underlying the metaphysical quest of the theater of the absurd: the absence of God and the emptiness of God-bereft man. Beckett's theater is one of deep existential anguish: "The boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being." Beckett's writing also contains an elegiac, apocalyptic note. The world is running down: "Something is taking its course."

Marx Bros. Plus Myths. After Beckett, the absurdist message is crystallized: life is a tragic farce. The absurdist reasoning goes like this: death makes any act of life futile, hence farcical, the funny side of absurdity. But if "God is dead," as Nietzsche proclaimed and the theater of the absurd assumes, then the universe itself is senseless, the tragic side of absurdity. For all their bravado, the playwrights of the absurd are inconsolable at the vision of a godless universe, but they regard their audiences as complacent, apathetic, asleep. With taunts and shock effects, by continually destroying illusion to remind playgoers that they are watching a play, by using the debased language of cliches, the absurdists try to wake up an audience to what they regard as life's tragic farce.

Edward Albee's The American Dream, for instance, is a masterly parody of cliche phrases designed to point up the absence of any of the real feelings the words originally conveyed. Eugene (Rhinoceros) lonesco uses chairs and furniture that proliferate with Marx Bros, zaniness in The Chairs and The New Tenant to dramatize major 20th century concerns --the tyranny of matter over spirit, the degradation of values, the confusion of ends and means.

End of the World. The philosophical presuppositions of the theater of the absurd have profoundly altered its theatrical practices. Plot and character are scanted. Character assumes individual personality; the absurdists assume an interchangeable massman puppet. Plot assumes direction in time; "what passes in these plays are not events with a definite beginning and a definite end, but types of situation that will forever repeat themselves." Almost all of these plays are circular. The last scene of Genet's The Blacks is identical with the first; the Negro actors prepare to enact their nightly ritual mock murder of a white woman. Author Esslin says well all that can be said for the theater of the absurd, its use of myth and ceremony, its revival of Keystone Kops-styled comedy, its probing behind surface reality for metaphysical truth, but he ignores flaws that, dramatically, are damning.

No play of the absurd dignifies man or elevates and purges the playgoer. The playwright of the absurd displays a cool, mocking tolerance toward his characters, but extends them little love--the breath of drama, as of life. In their panicky apprehension of doom, the absurdists seem more fashionable than durable, like those 19th century cultists who periodically and frustratingly readied themselves on mountaintops for the end of the world. Like so many of the doctors who prescribe for this age of guilt and anxiety, the playwrights of the absurd resemble the sickness more than the cure.

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