The Bald Soprano and The Lesson :

An Inquiry into Play Structure

by Richard Schechner

Lamont, Rosette C. (ed.) Twentieth Century Views IONESCO, Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973 pp. 21-37.

In April, 1951, a few months after the world premiere of The Bald Soprano in Paris, and two years after the play was written, Ionesco began to talk about the structure of his play.

The Bald Soprano, like The Lesson, among other things, attempts to make the mechanics of drama function in a vacuum. An experiment in abstract or non-representative drama. [. . .] The aim is to release dramatic tension without the help of any proper plot or any special subject. But it still leads, in the end, to the revelation of something monstrous : this is essential, moreover, for in the last resort drama is a revelation of monstrosity or some monstrous formless state of being or of monstrous forms that we carry in ourselves. [. . .] The progression of purposeless passion, a rising crescendo that is all the more natural, dramatic, and exciting because it is not hampered by content, and by that I mean any apparent content or subject which conceals the genuine subject from us : the particular meaning of a dramatic plot hides its essential significance.¹

“The Bald Soprano and The Lesson: An Inquiry into Play Structure” by Richard Schechner. Copyright © 1973 by Richard Schechner. Used by permission of the author. This essay appears for the first time in this volume.

¹Eugene Ionesco. Notes and Counternotes. Translated by Donald Watson. New York: Grove Press, 1964, pp. 180-81.

Ionesco packs a lot of fundamental theory into these 175 words. He claims for his first two plays an architectural, structural pristinity; he says that drama is the revelation of that monstrous (and I am reminded here of Greek myth, and the myth-rites of many other peoples as well) rising suddenly and perplexingly from the depths, as a vast whale from the sea. He says that drama is best which is least plotted because the plot is a veil concealing the action of the play.

In 1970 these assertions may seem passé, but they are not. We must locate Ionesco’s dramaturgy properly. He is a writer; he is talking about plays and not performances. He raises for us the questions of play structure, and questions put powerfully twenty years ago have not been resolved. Rather, performers have intervened and solved the questions for themselves (and, maybe, for the theater) by dismissing the writer and substituting the performer and the director. In considering Ionesco’s claims we are, perhaps, delving into an archaic problem. But, I think, before we are through we shall come to a fuller understanding of some current baffling situations. After all, we do not want to eliminate words from the theater, but find for them proper places. The writer is not the moneychanger to be chased from the temple, nor even the hypocrite. He has simply been off somewhere, doing something else. And Ionesco was among the first to suggest through his theory and his practice how the writer might re-enter the work of the theater.

Ionesco wants to reveal the structure by sucking out the content. He is an architect and a musician. He is interested in what supports drama, where the connections are, and in what direction the stresses run. The process of writing led him from parody to originality, a very difficult circle to close.

In my first play, The Bald Soprano, which started off as an attempt to parody the theatre, and hence a certain kind of human behavior, it was by plunging into banality, by draining the sense from the hollowest cliches of everyday language that I tried to render the strangeness and the farcical, the prosaic and the poetic, the realistic and the fantastic, the strange and the ordinary, perhaps these are the contradictory principles (there is no theatre without conflict) that may serve as a basis for a new dramatic structure. In this way perhaps the unnatural can by its very violence appear natural, and the too natural will avoid the naturalistic.²

² Ibid., p.28.

Stripping away, as a technique, eliminates the accustomed order of things, the causative world, and reveals rhythms. These may be thoracic—like breathing and heartbeat—or “natural”—like sunrise and sunset; or even metaphysical and ‘logical’ as when Mrs. Smith concludes that “experience teaches us that when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is never anyone there.” Here the structure of logical thought is laid out—namely, that one reasons from particular instances in accord with certain rules of induction and deduction. This structure is put up against the structure of theater—namely, that one can arrange whatever business one wishes.

Rhythms are automatic and often unconscious. They are patterns that are not necessarily causative. Night follows day but night does not cause day. To strip away the causative necessities that make a plot is to leave theater naked and to liberate the energies of rhythms. It is making theater approach music, that first art of rhythm-making and playing. These rhythms are alive in Soprano, but not the people, who are empty, mechanical, and dying. The drama’s language is alive; it has its own logic, it reproduces itself (the play’s climax), it creates people (Bobby Watsons), and situations (the courtship of the Martins). Soprano turns classic comedy on its head, and in doing so earns itself a place within the comic tradition. For that tradition is nothing other than finding new solutions to the oldest problem: how to beat death. Comedy does this by uncovering again and again life in the least likely places. In Soprano language is life. The obstacles to life are the Smiths and the Martins. As in the science-fiction film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a new life-force enters people, hollows them out, and takes over their shells. Inside the dead and dying people a new life-force stirs. It is not an evolution or a moral development. It is wholly new and alien.

Soprano opens with seventeen clangs of the clock—and Mrs. Smith says,   “There it’s nine o’clock.” Her talking is automatic, as if whatever is speaking is not yet used to English. “We’ve drunk the soup and eaten the fish and chips,” etc. Something is talking through Mrs. Smith, making its report, struggling with English grammar and vocabulary. (No wonder Ionesco punched through to the bottom of the opportunity of Soprano while studying English in the Assimil primer.) Mrs. Smiths talks English, but her language is no longer her own, nor is it that of the alien being inside her. That being, language itself, is learning English just as Hal does in Kubrick’s 2001. It is the instrument closest at hand. What is the difference between “language” and “English”? English is one of the limitless forms language may take as its expression. Mrs. Smith is not aware that she is the host for an alien being. Why should she be—are you aware of the millions of bacteria in your gut? As she dies to her old life she becomes the means of the new life.

She reports how she feels. She looks at herself and her family as if they were a far distance from her. She is not involved emotionally. In fact, each time she says “we” she could more correctly say “they.” Of course, from one perspective this is a protest against the “dehumanization” of man; a typical theme of the forties and fifties. But I think we are ready for a new interpretation. Mrs. Smith is not using language. It is using her. She is “they” because language is “I.” The language needs people because it is not able to live on its own, purely; people are its means of being, its host. But we ought not to prematurely or prejudicially abhor such a language. And surely we must not underestimate its power or deny to it a priori compassionate feelings. Some parasites are intelligent and cunning; and some the agents of high cultures. We have no reason to be contemptuous of these life-forms; such contempt is a function of ethnocentrism. “While writing this play,” Ionesco says, “I felt genuinely uneasy, sick and dizzy. [ . . . ] When I had finished I was nevertheless very proud of it. I imagined I had written something like the tragedy of language.”

The triumph of language is more like it. But Ionesco’s malaise is understandable. He is writing of possession in its pure and absolute sense; writing from within the experience of being possessed. When Ionesco finished his play it appeared a tragedy because the author was unable to fly away from his humanity--he is no traitor to his species. But he is a traitor to an aspect of his culture--that part which values individualism above everything else. Soprano is triumphant, comic, bouyant, and proud if you do not value individualism. The author is dizzy because his whole career indicates a deep problem concerning individualism, about which he has the most ambivalent feelings.

Looking behind the drama at some of its social implications, some twenty years after its premiere, we recognize that language is the most salient stirring of a wholly vivified environment—a world of teeming life where not only words but gestures, clocks, doorbells, servants—things which we expect to be dehumanized, manageable, “in their places”—spring alive with shocking energy. The Smith and the Martins are dying; the Fire Chief is the messenger of a new culture (this needs looking at later); and Marie is a liberated woman—the maid who won’t do what she’s told, the Fire Chief’s first lover, Sherlock Holmes.

Customarily we think of culture as the secretion of human living and experience. To use a visual metaphor, human beings are the core and culture the meat of the apple. The relationship between the biological and the sociological species is as between core and meat. But Soprano reverses that. At the core is the cultural, and around that, serving it, are the people. What we experience in this drama is a world in which culture (language, things) is alive and the people are secretions and by-products. The Martins don’t even know they are married until they discover so through deductive logic; and even then they are wrong (so Marie tells us). The Bobby Watsons proliferate as they are talked of because they are the children of language, not of human parents. The clock strikes as many times as it wants to. Sometimes when the doorbell rings there is someone there, and sometimes not. Even the stage directions have a rhetoric which identifies them with the rest of the drama, not with the author.

Words do not identify the Bobby Watsons. They live only as they can be talked about. They are the creations and the toys of a language just starting to explore its own possibilities. As Vannier says, “language has been promoted to the dignity of a theatrical object.”³ Words are no longer the vehicles of thoughts or feelings; they are themselves actions—the initiators of dramatic events. Conceivably, if we could see the Watsons we could tell old from young, male from female, living from dead.⁴ But the Watsons do not exist as people offstage (anymore than the invisible people of The Chairs are “real”); the Watsons are what they are—part of a conversation. Language makes the Watsons, and language can multiply, confuse, kill, birth, or do what it wills with them. The Smiths cannot interfere with this wordplay because ultimately the Smiths are like the Watsons. As Mrs. Martin reminds Mr. Martin, “This morning when you looked at yourself in the mirror you didn’t see yourself.” And he nicely answers, “That’s because I wasn’t there yet.”

³ Jean Vannier. “A Theatre of Language,” Tulane Drama Review 7, No. 3 (Spring. 1963), p.82.

⁴ One of the Bobby Watsons can’t even be visually “true.” She has regular features and yet one cannot say she is pretty. She is too big and stout. Her features are not regular but still one can say she is very pretty. She is a little too small and thin.” The clock is very amused by language’s play and it rings five times.

In Soprano there is little conflict between the drama’s protagonist –language—and the human beings. Even the mad dance finale is a dance of triumph, a celebration of language’s liberation from people. Perhaps, as Doubrovsky believes, this is an indication of despair, a revelation of monstrosity.

Instead of using language to think, we have language thinking for men. That mask must be torn from their faces. Thus is the “anti-character” comedy completed by “anti-wit” witticisms and speech-destructive speeches. [ . . . ] Once the barrier of language is disposed of, reality will assume a monstrous appearance. This is an experience reminiscent of the one Sartre describes in Nausea, only more radical.⁵

⁵ J. S. Doubrovsky, “Ionesco and the Comic of Absurdity,” Yale French Studies 23 (Summer, 1959), pp. 8-9. Also reprinted above, p. 11..

Doubrovsky’s reference to Nausea is significant. He ties Soprano to a mood which reached one of its climaxes just before World War II, and the other in the decade following the war. This mood was somber, even full of despair. It is not the mood of the seventies—which on the one hand is apocalyptic and on the other millennial. Why should language communicate for men? Why oughtn’t it have its own integrity and rights? Surely, as Doubrovsky says, Ionesco may have wanted to show the nothingness that lies coiled in the heart of being; or he may have wanted to deplore the subjugation of man by his former servants. Ionesco himself says, “for me, what had happened was a kind of collapse of reality. The words had turned into sounding shells devoid of meaning.”⁶ But we must set aside the author’s intentions if we are to look freshly, more than twenty years after it was written, at a work that seems today to have relevance and liveliness. From this new perspective I discern in Soprano triumph and celebration—not of individualized human beings, but of the possible next phase of cultural development.

⁶ Notes and Counternotes, p. 179.

The Fire Chief and Marie are not dead like the Smiths and the Martins. They live purposeful lives; and lovers; go to fires and movies; act as servants and confessors and detectives. The Fire Chief is the man who looks for fires; Marie recites the poem, “Fire.” R. D. Laing says, of fire: “There are many images used to describe the releated ways in which identity is threatened. [ . . . ] The image of fire recurs repeatedly. Fire may be the uncertain flickering of the individual’s own inner aliveness. It may be a destructive alien power which will devastate him.”7 Not in the usual narrative way, but in a musical and associative way the Fire Chief and Marie reinforce the major themes of The Bald Soprano. When Marie’s fire is put out by Mr. Smith’s hammer, the Fire Chief prepares to leave. “I must tell you that in exactly three-quarters of an hour and sixteen minutes, I’m having a fire at the other end of the city.” The exit of the Fire chief is the signal for the start of the final explosive dance. Marie’s “death” is a prelude to rebirth—at the “other end of the city.”

⁷ R. D. Laing. The Divided Self. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1960, p. 47.

The two scenes which precede the dance finale (Marie’s poem, the Fire Chief’s exit) are more easily understood structurally than narratively. It is futile to search for meaning in the lines themselves. “During rehearsals,” Ionesco recalls, “we discovered that the play had movement; in the absence of action [plot] there were actions, a rhythm, a development without plot, an abstract progression.”⁸ It is unfortunate that modern art took the term “abstract” as a description of a kind of nonfigurative structuring. Abstract suggests nonconcrete and general. Nothing could be more misleading. Abstract art is as concrete as the most vivid landscape and as specific as an image from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The “abstract progression” Ionesco alludes to in Soprano is the movement from the finish of individuality to the assertion of a new life-force; and the dropping of all “characterization” in the drama. In most productions of Soprano this has led to a mechanical way of performing—as if the Smiths, Martins, Marie, and the Fire Chief were puppets. It is possible that Ionesco intended this kind of performing. Indeed, at the very long run of the first revival of Soprano at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris, it was this kind of acting that I saw. That production had Ionesco’s approval, and, I believe, his assistance during rehearsals. But if a fresh interpretation of the play is possible, then maybe a fresh way of playing is called for.

⁸ Eugene Ionésco. Cahiers des Saisons 15 (1959), p. 283.

We have examples of performing without playing “characters.” Grotowski’s work, some of the pieces directed by Joseph Chaikin, and elements of Dionysus in 69, Makbeth, and Commune which I directed, approach the performer’s task differently. The text of a play and the actions it suggests are not aspects of a person (called a “character”). They are evocative stimuli working directly on the feelings of the performer. The performer performs “vis-à-vis” the text of the drama. He sets himself in front of the text and systematically removes those blocks that would prevent him from reacting openly and wholly to the text. He is not bound by the surface logic of the text, but is open to the farthest associations and most personal evocations.⁹ Thus, in this way of working, the Smiths, Martins, Marie, and the Fire Chief are not people, or puppets. They are “parts” – that is, sets of verbal notations, just as a musical part is a set of musical notations. These parts in themselves have no feelings. Each part is, however, a stimulator of feelings within the performer. To play these parts is not to recreate or create for the first time living people, but rather to allow these notations to stimulate whatever feelings are there within the performer. The living life is the performers; the text outlines the structure of the mise en scene. These two bases of the performance need not harmonize with each other. They may be in counterpoint, or utterly contradict each other. The performer’s task, and that of his director, is to remove all the obstacles preventing or impeding the free flow of feelings within the discipline of the verbal and (later during rehearsals) gestural notations. Ionesco’s early work would seem particularly well suited to this approach because of his drama’s architectural and musical qualities.

⁹ For a more detailed discussion of these techniques see Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969) and Richard Schechner, Public Domain (new York: Avon, 1969) and “Actuals: A Look into Performance Theory,” in Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, eds., The Rarer Action (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970).

Whether intentionally or not, Ionesco in Soprano goes beyond bourgeois drama and makes a play without individuated characters. He has also side-stepped the solution put forth by the German Expressionists and their “mass” characters. In Ionesco’s drama we are able to have the creativity of the performers and the vitality of a liberated language. To perform The Bald Soprano this way would be to radically reinterpret it, and make of it what I think it wants to be, a driving life-force comedy. “But words, it will be said, have metaphysical powers; it is not forbidden to conceive of speech as well as of gestures on the universal level, and it is on that level moreover that speech acquires its major efficacity, like a dissociative force exerted upon physical appearances, and upon all states in which the mind feels stabilized and tends toward repose.”¹⁰ Once again, Artaud speaks prophetically.

¹⁰ Antonin Artaud. The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary C. Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958, p.70.

The Lesson is in many ways the opposite of Soprano. But like so many oppositions, underlying them is an identity: for Lesson too is about life-force and triumph dancing. The difference is that Lesson uses familiar human beings.

Here, too, language is the hero/villain. Not that language possesses the Professor; no, it is his ally, his shield, his weapon, and his alibi. Truly in Lesson language has “metaphysical powers” and it operates like a “dissociative force exerted upon physical appearances.” The knife that rapes and kills, like the philology lecture itself, is a verbal knife: a concrete being whose substance is grammatical.

Power is the X-factor of Lesson. When the Pupil has it, the Professor is a timid old man; when he gets it, she is helplessly gripped by numbing pain; when Marie disarms the Professor, he becomes a whining baby—but while he has the power and is strong in his rage, Marie can do nothing with him. There is just so much power, and the game/ritual of Lesson is the flow of this power from one to another. The power is in the language. At its deepest level, lesson is a magic play, replete with special formulae and occult incantations. To know how to speak is to have power. But speaking is not ordinary English or French or any national language; rather, in the circularity so liked by Ionesco, the verbal language of the Professor’s lecture is the worded menifestation of the language of sexual power. But this does not make of verbal language merely a mask in the debased sense of masking. No, like the Elema hevehe ritual , the power is the mask: without the mask there is nothing, with it everything.

The orderly transfer of power is important. It is the rhythm of the play, its dancelike repetitiveness, its circles within circles. There is no “exaltation” until all the power is concentrated in the Professor’s magic knife. At that moment both the Pupil and Marie are empty.

Remember photos of dancers in which a torch or flashlight is carried so that after a long exposure the developed picture shows the pattern of movement? These are not motion pictures, but pictures of motion. The Lesson is a picture of motion and the torch is the power which flows among the three characters.

The setting does not prepare us for the play’s action. There is no hint in “the office of the old professor, which also serves as a dining room” that here a rape/murder will be committed, one of an unending series. The concealment of the insolite¹¹ within the banal is a favorite Ionesco device, and part of a set of contrapuntal details in Lesson. Others are the Professor’s age vs. his act; the Pupil’s apparent innocence vs. her behavior; Marie’s subservient social position vs. its deadly power. Both the romanticism and the farce of Lesson come from these oppositions.

¹¹ Insolite is a difficult French word to translate; it is one of Ionesco’s favorites. It means the astonishing, the unmaskingness of experience—as when the side of a building falls down to reveal your wife (or husband) in the arms of her (his) lover.

As soon as the Pupil enters, and the Professor sees her, the power flow begins. A quickly suppressed “lewd gleam” dances in his eyes. Marie, who lets the Pupil in, surely knows from experience what is going to happen. She is a sullen accomplice, a goad who guarantees the murderous outcome of events. (if Lesson were read as a political parable, Marie would be the “people” who seemingly deplore but actually assist each tyrant in his tyranny. The Nazi armband Marie gives to the Professor while they carry the Pupil’s body out supports the political reading.) The very presence of the Pupil—young, apparently innocent, pretty—and Marie’s warnings, cathect the first flow of energy.
 

Power is expressed among the characters, and flows from one to the other. It is ideally theatrical. Finally, power is the ability to use language, “to pronounce the word knife.”

Despite the Pupil’s inability to answer the most simple questions, the Professor is at first very pleased with her. He sees nothing standing in the way of her getting the “total doctorate.” The flirtation is obvious, and of that especially titillating kind between a very young girl and an old man. The language between Professor and Pupil is transparent, and behind it we experience the sexual play. In Soprano language burst through the Smiths and Martins to express its own life; here a subtext is revealed behind the text. Several times early in the play the whole rhythm of the “progressive exaltations” that make the play’s action is enacted. Lesson is structured musically—it develops not through the revelation of plot but through the intensification and repetition of moods and patterns. These increase in intensity and widen in amplitude, are played in varying keys of anger, amusement, love, and fear.

When the Professor asks the Pupil about the seasons, when she and he sit down together, when they begin arithmetic, when he is warned by Marie, when they start philology—each of these games are properly dances modeled on the “scalp dance” that ends in rape/murder. These dances are sometimes introductory, sometimes titillating, sometimes climactic. It is from a musical perspective that we ought to know the uses that the Professor makes of Marie’s meddling and warnings which only further raise his temperature. The small reservoir of power which is teased into play at the start builds rhythmically and in waves until it possesses the Professor and overwhelms the Pupil. This wavelike, musical development can be detected in the text, but fully appreciated only during performance.

I can outline this structure by discussing my staging (Provinvetown, 1961) of the scene in which the professor asks the Pupil to sit.

Professor. Then, may I ask you to sit down . . . there . . . . Will you permit me, miss, that is, if you have no objections, to sit down opposite you?
Pupil. Oh, of course, professor, please do.
Professor. Thank you very much, miss. [They sit down facing each other at the table, their profiles to the audience.] There we are. Now have you brought your books and notebooks?
Pupil [taking notebooks and books out of her briefcase]. Yes, Professor. Certainly, I have brought all that we’ll need.
Professor. Perfect, miss. This is perfect. Now, if this doesn’t bore you . . . shall we begin?
Pupil. Yes, indeed, Professor. I am at your disposal.
Professor. At my disposal? [A gleam comes into his eyes and is quickly extinguished; he begins to make a gesture that he suppresses at once.] Oh, miss, it is I who am at your disposal. I am only your humble servant.
Pupil. Oh, professor . . .

The text is super-polite. It is like two animals first meeting during mating season. Taking this as my subtextual action, I had the Professor gesture the Pupil to her seat. But she, being a well-brought-up girl, does not sit down before the Professor. He, in turn, cannot sit until after the “lady.” She, then, is playing a child who does not sit while adults are standing, and he a gentlemen who does not sit until the ladies are seated. Both these roles are games—for she is no child, and he no gentleman. But these are precisely the roles that can excite each of them most deeply. As he begins to sit she rises, and as she begins to sit he rises. The physical rhythms are not unlike sexual intercourse, and the feeling-center of their bodies for this scene is in the pelvis and very base of the spine. The performers played this game with each other, enjoying its combination of teasing and overt but not acknowledged sexuality, until the Professor cuts it off with “Therewe are.” He has been excited because a child has toyed with him; she has been excited because a man treated her as a grown-up. They now know for sure that a sexual exchange is possible between them. The Professor quickly changes the subject to “books and notebooks” and the Pupil answers with a double-entendre, “I have brought all that we’ll need.” The Professor picks up her cue and, speaking as much to himself as to her, replies, “Perfect, miss. This is perfect.” At each of his speeches, I had the Professor make the most subtle move toward the Pupil. He wants very much to reach out and just take her; but he doesn’t dare. She knows she is safe, and so she teases him by the way she sits, with her knees apart, absolutely open. The Professor wants to keep himself from going too far, the Pupil wants to go as far as she can; he is testing his restraining mechanisms and she her adventurous ones. The power flow is very evident here as both Professor and Pupil give and take. When she suggests that she is at his “disposal,” that is all he can bear. He has a mini-orgasm, reaches for her, suppresses his gesture, and apologizes. The bundle of energy that has been building during the scene is discharged. The Pupil senses that something has happened, and her “Oh, Professor” is a lilt of pleasure. She is pleased because she has been “recognized” sexually; he is pleased because he has come, ever so subtly and slightly.

There are seven beats to this brief scene.

This is an ebb-flow game/dance. It definitely takes two to play; its overall rhythm is that of coitus. This same structure is repeated several times during Lesson. It is the rhythmic leitmotif of the play. Ionesco says that the play works through a “progression by intensifying states of soul, feeling, situation, [and] anguish” that leads to an “exaltation.” This “progression” is the seven-beat pattern outlined above.

This pattern is repeated during the addition scene and during the subtraction-by-taking-away-ears scene. This latter is complicated because the Professor is frustrated, and the last beat is not gratification but frustration. When the Pupil does not respond “correctly” and the Professor is frustrated, his first response is to try another approach—new avenues to gratification. But these fail, he gets angry, and his anger arouses fear in her. The small pleasure sources released in the early scenes are frustrated after the addition scene. There is no release. Instead there is the build-up of energy and the transformation of fear in the pupil first into her toothache and then into the numbing pains in her legs, genitals, and breasts. Each frustration further stimulates the Professor, whose kindness is transformed into anger. This transformation is not necessarily psychologically valid; it is musically valid, like the shift in a symphony from the tonic to the dominant. The progression from geography to arithmetic to philology parallels the other transformations.

The philology lecture follows the same general plan as that of the earlier scenes. It would be hard to schematize the lecture into seven clear movements/beats because the lecture is long and complicated. The game/dance of the lecture—like that of the play as a whole—is that of a lesson. The Professor will “teach” the Pupil something. Each speech of his, each protestation of hers, augments his energy store. He can no longer put down his impulse to touch her, and by now his gestures are not gentle—he “seizes her wrist and twists it.’ Like the Smiths and the martins, the Professor is possessed. But he is not the host to some alien power. Rather his own gauge is the magic formula/incantation to further evoke and stimulate these energies. Brushing aside Marie’s interventions, he proclaims that he must make his Pupil “understand.” He picks the inevitable example that “will serve for all the languages” –the word knife. It is not a knife, but the word—the magic noumenon. The verbal rape/murder follows precisely the seven-beat scheme.

Here beat five is both pleasure and pain; beat six is no longer suppression but its opposite, expression. These inversions do not disturb the flow of the action which has been prefigured several times in the play; and which itself recapitulates the whole play.

Much of the force of Lesson comes from this repetition of scene structure. Without being able to specify what is being repeated, an audience is aware that something fundamental is happening again and again.

There is uncovering as well as repetition—the sexual actions, barely visible at the start, are overt and direct in the rape/murder. Therefore a musical mode, repetition, is combined with a theatrical one, uncovering. Considering the play as a whole, we find the same seven movements.

Of course, the play isn’t “neat” That would render it mechanical—my schematization is not an exact rendering but an approximate, and I hope useful, model. Taken as a whole Lesson is particularly rich and complicated because the relationship between the Professor and Marie parallels in some ways and contradicts in others the relationship between the Professor and the Pupil. Marie is servant, accomplice, mother, doctor, priest, and prophet. She helps the Professor, after warning him. She disarms him when he tries to do to her what he did to the Pupil. She consoles him when he is overwhelmed with remorse. She tells him how to get rid of the corpse and helps him do it. Not least, she answers the door and lets new pupil in.

Marie is there before the Professor and the Pupil; she is there when both of them have gone. She is the first and last person an audience sees on stage; she is the referee and the rule maker. Fundamentally she is uninterested in all that goes on. The Pupil is a victim of curiosity and vitality; the Professor is the object of his own compulsions and of a language of magic powers. But Marie is free because she doesn’t care. Her role is the most contemptible ethically, but the freest metaphysically. The others are trapped by the repetitions; she sets the wheels moving, and keeps them going.

It would be unfair to call Lesson a study of psychological compulsion. Individual psychology is not the object of the play, nor its subject. If anything, Lesson might be regarded as a study of sociological compulsion, a parable of destruction by habit and magic. Everyone is “guilty” – the servant who makes all the arrangements before and after and who does not back her warnings with effective sanctions; the all-too-willing victim; the murderer who will not believe what he was experienced innumerable times before—that “arithmetic leads to philology and philology leads to crime.” It may sound ridiculous, but it is history.

Much of the so-called Theater of the Absurd is now far enough behind us to be of marginal interest. It has blended with earlier movements—dada, surrealism, varieties of existentialism—and exerts its influence as part of a large mass of literature protesting the dehumanization of the spirit and the encroachment of mechanization, and it regards modern civilization as a threat to liberty and an object of ridicule. Some of Ionesco’s theater fits this movement—from Rhinoceros through Thirst and Hunger, his “middle period.” But his first period—from Soprano to Victims of Duty (1949-1953) and including, especially, Soprano, Lesson, Jack, Chairs, and Victims –transcends the movement of which these plays are a part. These works, though having their quotient of despair, are, in my view, celebrations of life-force. The individual is no longer powerful; bourgeois living is empty. But I glimpse in these comedies a celebration of alien life-forms, an acknowledgment (no matter how ironic and grudging) of collective experience and living.

These plays have an original and highly musical style. It is this style whose structure I have tried to reveal. Ionesco himself calls Soprano and Lesson “experiment[s] in abstract or nonrepresentative drama [ . . . ] the progression of purposeless passion.” Purposeless because it is not the slave of plot, but the direct apprehension of the flow of energy from within the dramatic structure itself.

Ionesco feels that these plays reveal “monstrous forms that we carry in ourselves.” I agree but think of the monstrous as evil only from the perspective of individualism. Otherwise, “monstrous” means only something unusual and rarely glimpsed; and perhaps a harbinger of new times. In Soprano the characters are masks of social compulsions. The Professor, the Pupil, and Marie are the objects of a willful grammar—not merely a language starting to know itself and its hosts, as in Soprano, but of an already highly developed system, a grammar whose chief law is that “arithmetic leads to philology and philology leads to crime.” The Professor refuses to believe this, and so he repeats rape/murder again and again. We are leaving “rationalism’ and entering a time of sacral magic. Whether we deplore or welcome these changes will to a large degree condition our response to Soprano and Lesson. What is triumphant to one mind will be horrific to another.

In both plays Ionesco masterfully builds closed systems that are integral and complete. These systems relate to other systems only by analogy: what happens in Soprano and Lesson is parallel and homologous to what happens in society. The plays are not “about” anything; they refer only to themselves. That is why I call their structure musical. But they are not nonsense plays; and there is nothing wrong with pointing out analogies between them and society. I think Soprano and Lesson are good plays for practitioners of the new theater to work with because these plays’ structures are compatible with the procedures of the new theater.

Soprano and Lesson will probably stand up very well in time. They do not depend on tricks, but on the cohesion of their parts. They probe deeply, and originally. They are playable and offer performers a creative challenge. Most of all, they suspend in balance a difficult tension—tat between the social and the structural. Enough of the mood of the postwar and cold war days is in these plays to give them substance and historicity. But they have been put together by a mind fine and sensitive enough to transcend their historicity. For a long time they will evoke interpretations on stage.