2024–2025
The Bald Soprano
Playwright: Eugène Ionesco
September 12, 2024 – September 29, 2024
The Mainstage
About this play
The Smiths, an English couple, sit in their living room exchanging utterly banal conversation. Their friends the Martins arrive; a fire chief appears looking for fires. As the evening progresses, language fragments, conversation loops back on itself, and meaning dissolves entirely — until the play threatens to begin again from the start with the couples having swapped roles. A merciless satire of middle-class conversation and the emptiness of social ritual.
Ionesco's debut play and a cornerstone of the Theatre of the Absurd.
About the Playwright
Eugène Ionesco (born Eugen Ionescu; November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright and one of the foremost figures of the Theatre of the Absurd. Born in Romania and settled in Paris, he wrote mostly in French and is best known for subverting the conventions of realist theatre to expose the absurdity of bourgeois life and the breakdown of human communication. His debut, The Bald Soprano (1950), ran in Paris for decades. He was elected to the Académie française in 1970.