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.