THE BALD SOPRANO
Written in 1948 and first performed in 1950, Eugene Ionesco’s best-known work satirizes a closed world: a pretentious middle-class English household. Ionesco mocks its inhabitants by making them mouth arbitrarily assembled sentences from an English phrase book he was studying. Their irrelevant remarks parody the cliches and rote emotions of bourgeois conversation, the detritus of a frozen life. Of course arbitrary identities are common in phrase books; Ionesco goes one step further to suggest that, yes, such tourist aids actually mirror bourgeois reality.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Though The Bald Soprano is based on linguistic exercises–the title comes from the non sequitur “The bald soprano always wears her hair in the same style”–there’s nothing dry about the results. The host couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are so stuffy they’re caricatures of British restraint, though their disconnected discourse is delivered with an often frenetic urgency that such nonsense scarcely deserves: irrelevant anecdotes about well-preserved corpses and indistinguishable relatives who all bear the same name. At irregular intervals the Smiths are interrupted by the French maid, who doubles as a chiming clock.
After the Fire Chief relates some long and irrelevant tales, the French maid regales the company with a poem about a wild fire, the chief remembers he’s overdue for an upcoming blaze, and the Martins and Smiths erupt in a crazed litany of phrases that finally crash into silence. The play ends as it began, with the Smiths indulging in the same small talk–except now it’s done by the actors who played the Martins. Interchangeable identities.
Pig in a Poke’s Bald Soprano is certainly no classroom reconstruction of a sacred cow; it won’t scare folks away from seeing more Ionesco. This hour-long absurdist comedy may offer a bleak perspective on the fragility of language, but these failures to communicate also fuel some incongruously good-humored high jinks.
