Eugène Ionesco's THE BALD SOPRANO to be Presented Off-Broadway

Starting on October 11th, The Resident Acting Company will present The Bald Soprano written by Eugene Ionesco, directed by Bradford Cover. It will celebrate its opening night on October 15, 2026, and run through November 1, 2026, at The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture.

One of the defining works of the Theatre of the Absurd, The Bald Soprano turns an ordinary evening among seemingly ordinary people into an increasingly hilarious collision of clichés, contradictions, non sequiturs, and linguistic mayhem. More than 75 years after Ionesco first wrote the play, its skewering of empty conversation and the ways people talk without actually communicating may feel more recognizable than ever. The play has remained an international theatrical touchstone ever since then. New York Times has praised the play's “deliriously silly” verbal comedy.

Ionesco was inspired to write the play while taking English language lessons, and he says it occurred to him that the simple exercise sentences he was writing were actually profound truths about human existence.  He said, “A bizarre phenomenon occurred, I don't know how: the text transformed before my eyes, imperceptibly, against my will. The simple yet brilliant proposals I had carefully written in my school notebook left there, settled after a while, moved on their own, and became corrupted and denatured. The replications from the manual, which I had nevertheless copied correctly, one after the other, went haywire.”

The cast features Rachel Botchan (Off Broadway: The Mulberry Tree, King of the Jews), Anique Clements (Off-Broadway: Julius Caesar, All's Well That Ends Well), Dominic Cuskern (Broadway: Inherit the Wind), Dan Daily (Off-Broadway: Richard III), Carine Montbertrand (Off-Broadway: RAC's MIDSUMMER), and Andy Paterson (Regional:  The Devil's Deciple).  

The Resident Acting Company evolved out of what was The Pearl Theatre Company, which closed its doors in 2017.  The Pearl was the last professional company to produce The Bald Soprano in New York in 2011.  Rachel Botchan, Dan Daily, and Bradford Cover appeared in that production, and Hal Brooks directed it.