Hey there! I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we'll be discussing the Theater of the Absurd.

Godot? That's your cue. Godot? Godot? It's fine, plenty of time to wait for that guy: not a lot happens in these plays.

lights up, when you get around to it.

What is the Theater of the Absurd, and how absurd is it? Glad you asked! Very! Sometimes.

It's a movement that got going in the 1950s, influenced by the events of forties.

Because, after you've come out of a world war in which millions of people were killed, maybe light comedy doesn't really do it for you anymore.

The Theater of the Absurd wasn't one of those moments where everyone hung out in bars and had parties together.

And maybe that's good, because some of those parties would have been… dour.

No, it was more of a loose style that a bunch of playwrights started writing in pretty much independently.

And then, one day, critic Martin Esslin noticed and wrote an essay about it, and—bam!—a movement was born. Or identified. Or whatever.

The Theater of the Absurd is another style that rejects realism.

Absurdism, like Dadaism and Surrealism, is predicted on the idea that life doesn't really make sense.

So theater shouldn't make sense either.

This isn't absurd like comedy-in-2018, more of a deeply dissatisfied, questioning kind of absurd.

Plots are disordered. Nothing happens, or if stuff does happen, it's unmotivated.

Words don't make meaning in the usual way, and characters aren't consistent.

Mysteries don't get solved, and order doesn't get restored. … LOL

Philosophically, the worldview of the Theater of the Absurd is similar to existentialism, probably because Esslin was influenced by Albert Camus.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus wrote: "A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.

But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity." … LOL

Esslin thought that the Theater of the Absurd could help its audience to accept life as meaningless and maybe not be so depressed about this.

He wrote: "It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly;

precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world.

The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief.

And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation." … … LOL?

There are a lot of playwrights who get labeled absurdist, including Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire, and also the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello,

king of the "it happened like this. No, it happened like that. Nope, I'm never gonna understand this because the world is fundamentally unknowable play.

We're going to look at three other absurdist playwrights today, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett.

Jean Genet was born in France in 1910 and was abandoned soon after.

As a kid, he tried to run away a lot, and he often stole.

When he was fifteen, he was sent to French juvie.

When he turned eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion, but he was drummed out for being gay.

He wandered around for a while, supporting himself with prostitution and petty theft.

He was in and out of prison, and it was in prison that he began to write, completing an experimental novel, "Our Lady of the Flowers," in 1944.

Genet became popular with the French intellectual crowd.

So when he was threatened with life imprisonment in 1949 for more theft, those intellectuals came together to petition the government to free him.

And the government said okay.

Philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre was such a fan that he wrote a seven hundred-page analysis of his life and work called "Saint Genet."

When Genet turned to the theater, first with the short play "Deathwatch,"

he established the themes that would fascinate him for years: sex, power, beauty, degradation, ritual, and theatricality itself.

Most of the characters in Genet's plays are consciously playing roles that can suddenly be reversed.

And with a shift in power dynamics comes a shift in sexual dynamics.

Reality often shifts, too, which gives the plays a disturbing, decentering quality.

You can see this in "The Balcony," which is set in a brothel that caters to sexual role play,

and in "The Blacks," in which a cast of black actors perform in white face.

Genet died in Paris in 1986.

Let's take a closer look at Genet's work by dusting off his three-character 1947 drama, "The Maids." Grab a mop, ThoughtBubble:

"The Maids" begins with a scene between a mistress and her maid, Claire.

Their relationship isn't great. Madame insults Claire, and Claire bullies Madame, forcing her to wear a red dress. Claire spits at her.

Then an alarm clock goes off, startling both women.

We realize that "Madame" is actually the maid Claire, and "Claire" is her sister Solange,

and that this is an elaborate psychosexual game they play, taking turns as Madame.

As they wait for Madame, the phone rings. It's Monsieur, Madame's lover.

He's been in prison, mostly because of an anonymous letter the maids sent.

Now he is out on bail. Bad news for the maids.

They're afraid he'll recognize their handwriting.