(2 of 3)
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.