The Lesson
by Eugène Ionesco
L'Etage Cabaret
February 22 - March 18, 2009
Directed by Tina Brock
Director
Tina Brock
Costume Design
Brian Strachan
Costume Construction
Lorraine Anderson
Cutter/Draper
Rufus Cottman
Stage Manager/Assistant Director
Lee Pucklis
Production Manager
Bob Schmidt
Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.
This production is funded in part by a generous grant from
The Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
The IRC participates in the Barrymore Awards Honoring Excellence in Theater.
The IRC is a non-profit 501C3 corporation.
*Members of Actors Equity Association
Playing time is 65 minutes; there will be no intermission
Reviews
The Lesson (2009)
"...most of the time the audience sat with stunned smiles on their faces. Tina Brock's astute direction hands us this difficult play on a platter."
Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"He (Ionesco) would be pleased with IRC, a daring little company whose seven productions since 2006 have included rarities by Samuel Beckett, Christopher Durang and the staff of The Onion."
Mark Cofta, Philadelphia City Paper
"...marvelously complemented by the visual outlandishness of Brian Strachan’s phenomenal costumes (all in varying shades of green, with a fanciful overload of patterns and textures) and the actors’ physical distinctiveness..."
K. Ross Hoffman, Philadelphia City Paper Blog
Director's Notes
February 2009
Greetings.
Eugene Ionesco was a Romanian-born (1909) playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays illustrate in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.
Ionesco's earliest and most innovative works were one-act nonsense plays: La Cantatrice chauve (1950) translated as The Bald Soprano; La Leçon (1951), translated as The Lesson; Les Chaises (1952), translated as The Chairs, and Jacques ou la Soumission (1955), translated as Jack, or The Submission. These absurdist sketches, to which he gave such descriptions as "anti-play" (anti-pièce in French) express modern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of communication with surreal comic force, parodying the conformism of the bourgeoisie and conventional theatrical forms.
In them, Ionesco rejects a conventional story-line, instead taking their dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms and/or cyclical repetitions. He disregards psychology and coherent dialogue, thereby depicting a dehumanized world with mechanical, puppet-like characters who speak in non-sequiturs. Language becomes rarefied, with words and material objects gaining a life of their own, increasingly overwhelming the characters and creating a sense of menace.
Rehearsing this work is like watching and coaching a sporting event -- when the players are present, listening and reacting, as in any good play or sporting event -- it is exciting and engaging. Yet when the pacing and rhythm of the play are off, the farce doesn't build, and you get a very different play, one that can be difficult to understand because you begin trying to figure it out instead of being pulled along for the ride. It can leave you feeling as though there is something you aren’t getting. The play needs to move at a pace where the words wash over and bombard the audience.
The actors must pursue their intentions with a ferocity that doesn't flag for 65 minutes. The humor and meaning in the play comes from the sheer overload of energy. They should be exhausted at the end of the show. Adding to that, L'Etage, which is an interesting setting for The Professor's parlor, provides challenges because of the many textural elements in the space that absorb the actor's voices; the various levels in this space also create special challenges for the actors in creating the energetic build necessary.
The Lesson, though written in the 50's, seemed to me very right to produce at this time -- so many words exchanged with so little understanding -- how funny and tragic that can be.
Thanks for being a part of the IRC’s third season, and for helping us grow the company. This year the IRC celebrates the 100th anniversary of Eugene Ionesco’s birth. I hope you’ll follow our progress on our website and look for us during Fringe 2009 in September presenting Ionesco’s The Chairs at The Red Room at the historic Society Hill Playhouse.
Thanks and enjoy!
Tina Brock
Artistic Director
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Tue, Feb. 24, 2009
by Toby Zinman
Theater Review
A prof, a pupil, very little learned
Idiopathic presents a sparkling revival of Ionesco's absurdist parable.
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school / It's a wonder I can think at all."
That old Paul Simon lyric speaks to the meaning - or one of the layers of meaning - in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play The Lesson. Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, at L'Etage, has revived this very European dramatic parable, providing us with a sparkling hour's lesson about the abuses of authority, whether in the classroom or in government. Despite the bizarre subject matter - comparative linguistics and arithmetic - it's all highly enjoyable; most of the time the audience sat with stunned smiles on their faces. Tina Brock's astute direction hands us this difficult play on a platter.
A young woman (Kate Black-Regan) arrives at the home of her professor (the excellent Tom Byrn) for an hour's tutorial. His maid (Jane Moore) shows her into the parlor. Sitting on a little chair with her little green shoes sticking out and her carrot curls peeking from under her little straw hat, all saucy glances and perfect diction, Black-Regan is one of the most adorable creatures to take the stage in recent memory.
Although The Pupil wants to complete her "total doctorate" in three weeks, The Professor starts off with easy stuff - basic arithmetic - and it soon becomes apparent that The Pupil can add but not subtract. She can multiply, but only because, unable to grasp the principle of multiplication, she has memorized every possible answer. She is an exasperating pupil. He is an exasperated professor.
Once he starts on languages, things take a turn for the worse. During a spectacular monologue on the arbitrary nature of words and sounds ("deaf ears are veritable tombs of sonority"), she develops a toothache. The key word, in both lecture and plot, turns out to be knife. Note that it has two silent letters. Note, too, that this play is translated from the French. Note, too, that Ionesco's native language was Romanian.
We watch The Pupil go from what dentists cruelly call "mild discomfort" to sheer agony; The Professor has neither sympathy nor patience. Eventually, his sense of entitlement carries him away. No spoilers, except to say that Brock's direction seems, surprisingly, to have desexualized the conclusion.
Bravo to Brian Strachan, who designed the delightful costumes (made by Rufus Cottman and Lorraine Anderson): essence-of-springtime green calico prints for their dresses and his vest, and extreme green velvet for his academic regalia. Pomp and circumstance cubed.
Ionesco said that "a work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate - and which sometimes can be communicated. That is its paradox and its truth." This may well be one of those "sometimes." To continue their celebration of Ionesco's 100th birthday, the Idiopathic group will present his brilliant, moving The Chairs in September.
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The Lesson
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at L'Etage, Sixth & Bainbridge Streets.
Through March 18.
Tickets: $18. Information: 215-285-0472 or info@idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.
ARTS
Arts Picks
The Lesson
Feb. 22-March 18, $18, L'Etage, 624 S. Sixth St., 215-285-0472, idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.com.
by Mark Cofta
Published: Feb 17, 2009
THEATER
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium — which is fun to say after a cocktail or six — brings more "good nothingness to life," as its slogan promises, with a rare production of Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson, featuring Tom Byrn, Jane Moore and Kate Black-Regan. The seldom-seen absurdist play typifies Ionesco's seemingly banal but actually pointed expression of the futility of communication, tangibly depicting the solitude and insignificance of human existence — but don't fear, it's funny! Scholar Rosette Lamont called Ionesco's work "metaphysical farce," in which comedy makes philosophical thought and political criticism more palatable. Ionesco once said, "I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon [sic] and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theater and it is the place where one dares the least." He'd be pleased with IRC, a daring little company whose seven productions since 2006 have included rarities by Samuel Beckett, Christopher Durang and the staff of The Onion. But don't expect any tortoises on Ionesco's fanciful wish list upstairs at L'Etage: "A work of art," the great man said, "is above all an adventure of the mind."
Feb. 22-March 18, $18, L'Etage, 624 S. Sixth St., 215-285-0472, idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.com.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, March 1, 2009
New and Noteworthy
The Lesson (Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium)
A sparkling, funny revival of Ionesco's absurdist one-act. This very European dramatic parable about the dangers of tyranny is performed to perfection under Tina Brock's smart direction. Through March 18. ---T.Z.
Philadelphia City Paper Blog
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
by K. Ross Hoffman
Arts, Theater
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s The Lesson, L’Etage Cabaret
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot will be shot.”
That’s the preamble to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but the sentiment would seem to apply more aptly to the works of Eugène Ionesco, which are guided by precisely this sort of anti-literary (or in his case, anti-theatrical) ethos, and marked with the same sense of dry humor and ominous, inexplicable aggression. In her program note for the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s production of the absurdist master’s The Lesson (1951), mounted in honor of his 100th birthday, director Tina Brock explains that his plays derive their meaning not through the conventional establishment of characters and situations, with coherent dialogue and psychology, but instead by the rhythmic accumulation of a “sheer overload of energy.”
There’s no question that The Lesson is illogical, and often nonsensical. The central action concerns a professor (Tom Byrn) instructing his pupil (Kate Black-Regan) in basic arithmetic (a little curious, since she’s a high school graduate on her way to earning a “total doctorate,” but at least the math is correct) and comparative linguistics (in this case wholly invented and preposterous, concerning among other things the imperceptible distinctions between Spanish, Neo-Spanish, Sardinopolian and Oriental, but consistent within its own batty logic). Oddly enough, though, the more eccentric aspects of the narrative end up feeling secondary to The Lesson’s larger, lingering resonance. The play’s nonsense is comic, even whimsical, but the comedy is ultimately outpaced by tragic, disturbing overtones which stem not from absurdity but from a recognizable, albeit grossly warped and distorted, form of psychic realism.
As the lesson progresses, the pupil develops a (plausibly psychosomatic) toothache, which the professor ignores cruelly and pointedly — watching Black-Regan contort her face in mounting agony, fluctuating between indignant protestation and resigned obedience in the face of Byrn’s apoplectic, spittle-flecked determination to complete his lecture, was deliciously distressing. That queasy tension, deriving though it does from an implausibly exaggerated set of circumstances, is nonetheless entirely psychological and empathetic. Enhanced by the mysterious yet clearly ill-portending warnings (”philology leads to calamity!”) of the professor’s too-deferential maid (Jane Moore), the tension even functions to propel the plot, in an almost banal, linear fashion, as the play builds surely and steadily to a climax which I feel I should leave unspoken even though the concept of a “spoiler” would seem antithetical to the precepts of absurdism.
So shoot me, there is a plot. There’s a moral, too — Ionesco was never above a bit of moralizing — having something to do with abuses of power and the frivolousness of formal education, not to mention the futility of communication (with maniacs, anyway.) As for motives, they’re admittedly a good deal more oblique. The inhuman senselessness of the characters’ actions, if not their attitudes (which progress coherently enough from polite to pleased to frustrated to furious), is emphasized in this production by a hyper-intent, over-articulate, fever-pitched acting style. That intensity is marvelously complemented by the visual outlandishness of Brian Strachan’s phenomenal costumes (all in varying shades of green, with a fanciful overload of patterns and textures) and the actors’ physical distinctiveness (Byrn’s considerable stature; Black-Regan’s wide round eyes and shocking-orange curls).
Although this exaggerated approach is conventional for absurdist theater, and these actors are certainly to be commended for their embodiment of what Brock describes as “unflagging ferocity,” it would be interesting to see a production that allowed us to grasp more of the characters’ tenuous humanity, rather than presenting them as fierce, fearsome, impenetrable façades. Not that it would make the play any less unsettling: On the contrary, by accentuating the text’s latent semblance of realism, its deeper underlying absurdity might feel that much more sinister, and disturbingly relevant.
The Lesson runs for three more performances: Wed., March 11, Sun., March 15, Wed., March 18; 7:30 p.m., $18, L’Etage Cabaret, 6th and Bainbridge streets, reserve tickets at idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.com
Philadelphia City Paper
Philly arts scene Top 5
Theater (Indie)
"The Lesson"
After having some lighthearted fun by dramatizing the pages of the Onion Newspaper just a couple weeks ago, IRC (Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium) returns to their bread and butter: producing the oft forgotten plays of the absurdist genre. This time up it’s Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 classic, “The Lesson,” about the intersection of education, power and fascism.
L’Etage
624 Bainbridge St.
Through Mar. 18
$12 - $15, 215-925-9665
www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.com
Philadelphia Weekly
March 3, 2009
ARTS AND CULTURE
A-List
by J. Cooper Robb
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium continues presenting classic absurdist theater with Eugène Ionesco’s 1951 one-act play The Lesson. Clocking in at just 65 minutes, Ionesco’s dark farce focuses on a frustrated teacher and his eager pupil. In this work, a lesson is transformed into a tragic battle between intellect and instinct.
Through March 18. $18. L’Etage, Sixth and Bainbridge sts. 215.592.0656. www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.com