The Bald Soprano at Loyola University Maryland

Authors

• Eugene Ionesco

Praised as a modern classic and one of the first major works of the Theatre of the Absurd, the play is renowned for its comic caricatures and absurd hilarity. When Ionesco attempted a self-taught English language program in the 1940s, he was startled by how banal, uncommunicative, and absurd the phrases he was learning were. And what he called a "tragedy of language" became the basis for his first play. Set in a bourgeois English household, the comedy displays the bizarre and comic disintegration of language and communication. The title is thought to have originated from a verbal slip-up by an actor during the original rehearsal period. The Bald Soprano has been in continuous performance in Paris since 1957 making it one of the longest continuously running theatre productions in the world.