Program Materials
France has a long history of separation of church and state ever since the “French Declaration of the Right of Man and Citizen in 1789. France goes so far as to regulate all aspects of religious life to ensure that the secular rights of France’s people are not being infringed by religious practices.
France was ravaged after World War II and the rebuilding effort was unlike any other with everyone working together to use whatever means necessary to rebuild the country. During this time, old regimes had collapsed and those who had been in power had not proven themselves capable to govern which left younger enlisted who united for French liberation.
This time was full of uncertainty for the French people, especially Ionesco who had lost his job with the Romanian consulate after criticizing the Romanian allegiance with Russia. He was forced to take on odd jobs like proofreading and working in a warehouse.
In 1949, Ionesco wrote the Bald Soprano from source material he had written in Romanian called, English Without a Professor. The play was inspired by Ionesco’s attempt to learn English using the Assimil method, English without Pain. The system consists of a recording and workbook. The phrases on the recording are to be repeated to get the ear acquainted with the sound of the language before later lessons ask the learner to construct their own sentences.
Ionesco was stuck by the absurdity of repeating those phrases while also revealing truths about reality such as the ceiling is up, and the sky is blue. This inspired Ionesco to not only break the structure of a play in his work, but to question and break the structure of language itself. Ionesco also taps into our build in ability to recognize patterns and then breaks those patterns using excessive repetition where actions typically don’t match the words being spoken.
Our production is inspired by the idea that if Ionesco were alive today to see how our society struggles with issues of gender and sexual identity, he may have chosen to deconstruct those issues further. We aim to take his work to the next level and deconstruct gender, gender identity and sexual identity in order to point out the absurdity of the compulsory hetero-normative behavior of society.