Fortifying themselves for an absurdist all-nighter
01.01.70
A 24-Hour The Bald Soprano , as it's called by Brat Productions, where Distefano is co-artistic helmsman, has been a theatrical event here three times before, when Brat has also carried it through the night and into the next day, before sundown.
If any play is made to be turned into the musical equivalent of a "round," with performances that a moment ago keep going, it's this one-act. Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano about two couples, asset a fire chief and a maid, so that at the end of the play one of the couples begin to deliver the same lines that the other team a few spoke when the play began.
Distefano built on that idea. If the couples alteration roles at the end of The Bald Soprano but use the same lines as the beginning, why not just keep affluent, with the actors who portray each couple switching roles back and forth in a Bald Soprano manacle that becomes an acting endurance test?
The Bald Soprano defies regular stage conventions because it's filled with non sequiturs, characters with unfathomable motivations, and illogical situations. It was Ionesco's first go along with, produced in 1950; he wrote it, he said, after being impressed by the banalities in the English phrasebook he was using to learn the vocabulary. (Romanian by birth, he wrote both in his native language and in French.) The fiddle with has been running - not in consecutive hours - for decades as part of the nightly bill at a small Paris theater.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer