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About the Playwright Eugene Ionesco (1912 - 1994) was a Franco-Romanian author who has been called the founder of the Theater of the Absurd. In all, Ionesco wrote 28 plays, some of which have been in constant performance since 1955, several volumes of essays, criticism, a novel called The Hermit which was made into a film called La Vase and starred the author himself. Ionesco began writing plays late in life as an exercise to explore the emptiness of clichéd language in The Bald Soprano (1948) and move on to depict the ridiculous of human existence through multiplying objects, chairs, coffee cups, furniture, & in Killing Game (1970) dead bodies, giving us what he called the Theater of Derision. Early in his career critics believed his work to be obscure, but his plays have gone on to international acclaim, most famously Rhinoceros (1959). Included in his many honors was his election in 1970 to The Academy Francaise. |
