If you are not already familiar with The Bald Soprano, it may be best to read the director's note after watching the show. Or if you don't care about spoilers, do as you like.  - Jonah K.

 

In preparing dramaturgy for The Bald Soprano, I read excerpts from Eugene Ionesco’s journals and speeches as well as writings from theatre professionals like Richard Schechner. Both of these writers spent the bulk of their analysis of the text discussing language as a force that controls. Schechner went as far to call the text “possession in its pure and absolute sense: writing from within the experience of being possessed,” and watching, as you soon will, the final 10 minutes of this production, one cannot help but feel the image of possession and exorcism. Ionesco and Schechner, of course, disagree on the meaning of this exorcism. Ionesco calls it the “tragedy of language” while Schechner the “triumph of language”. Schechner wrote that reversal 20 years after the original production of The Bald Soprano, and I write this note 50 after Schecher and 75 years following the original publication of Ionesco’s play. At this point in 2025, I return to Ionesco’s concept of “tragedy” in this comedy. This cycle, this ebb and flow of tragedy and triumph, the sine and cosine, the tick of the metronome and the void that follows; this is the essential nature of Soprano.

 

Ionesco, a French-Romanian, wrote Soprano five years following the end of World War 2 where, no doubt, the power of language as propaganda seeped into the work. Ionesco witnessed the tragedy of a world where language divorced from reality, language as a tool of control, language as a tool of death. Schechner, on the other hand, wrote on Soprano five years following the end of the Civil Rights Movement, he witnessed the triumph of language as a tool of liberation, language as a tool of life (I cannot entirely ignore Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on linguistics and propaganda regarding the Vietnam War and the Cold War during this similar era, but this director’s note is already too bloated to discuss these nuances). Here again, I write 5 years after a global pandemic where language was weaponized once again by those at every level of power as a tool: for some of control, for some of liberation, for some life, and for many death. This hidden rhythm of Soprano in these contexts reveals the nature of the text as one interested in time.

 

Time, of course, is a mostly modern convention. While time metaphysically has more-or-less always existed (I prompt any would-be physicists to argue on this point on their own time), the conception of a clock that controlled our day-to-day lives is mostly no older than the industrial revolution (that old villain of history). I won’t bore you with the history of clocks, necessarily, but the first properly standardized clock didn’t come around until Paris’s master clock and the pneumatic clock system which arrived in the 1880’s. Evolving from there, better mechanical and eventually electric clocks took the world by storm, and now I have a down-to-the-second accurate clock on my phone, laptop, alarm clock, microwave, stove, television, game system, and digital camera. I have meetings scheduled on my calendar months in advance down to the minute. You can see ThreePenny’s productions for September and December and know they will start at 7:30 pm and you know what 7:30 pm means. Time controls more of our day-to-day lives than most other agreed upon sources of control or power.

 

In The Bald Soprano, in case you’ve forgotten that’s what this director’s note is about, the symbol of the clock appears regularly throughout the text: often interrupting, pausing, starting, and changing the scenes. Sometimes it is there, and sometimes it is not, but the force remains present. In fact, if we do not do our job on stage too well, you will likely look at the clock on your wrist or in your pocket once or twice during the runtime. Indeed, there is a scheduled start time on your digital ticket that dictates the beginning of this play, and should you not show up at the appointed time, you run the risk of missing the performance entirely. And the text is produced without scene breaks or act breaks or an intermission, so the time that you spend watching it is the real time experience of all the events in the play.

 

Finally, the play is, fundamentally, a time loop. One where we see only one closed loop instead of the same day over and over. At the end of the play, the characters change their positions, and the play goes again (luckily for you only for a few lines, or else you really might start checking your watch!). But, the play is also a metaphysical time loop because while you may only see the play once (or twice if you really enjoyed it) for the actors and the stage crew, we will come again tomorrow at the appointed time and do the show again. The day after that? We shall do the show again. In fact, the original production from May of 1950 holds the world record for the longest continuously running theatrical production: again and again and again. 

 

As the lights dim here in a few minutes, the first character to speak is not Mr. or Mrs. Smih, Mr. or Mrs. Martin, Mary the Maid, or the Fire Chief (which are the only six characters you will see mentioned in the playbill). No, as you will witness, the first character to speak is the clock with 17 chimes. The alarm clock starts most of our days taking us from the world of sleep and rest to the world of life and labor, and we look at the clock in the night letting us know it’s bedtime. And so the chiming of this clock will take you, for a moment, from the world of the real to the world of the absurd that comically or tragically, despairingly or triumphantly resembles our own perhaps a little too much. And as the clock signifies a restart of the play for the characters within, you, the characters without, will return to your modern real days likewise controlled by language and time. I do not know if these Sisyphi are happy in their daily repetitious toil (to misquote, briefly, another French absurdist, Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”), but we must laugh (as I hope you do in this comedy) as we push the boulder none-the-less. Away from tragedy; perhaps towards triumph.