Back in 1997, an unknown company called The Hypocrites put up a production of The Bald Soprano at the Café Voltaire. Now, 10 years later, The Hypocrites return to their first love, Eugene Ionesco. In this play, the Smiths and the Martins try desperately to communicate with one another with a language that has lost all meaning. Fascinated by the banality of sentences used as examples while trying to learn English, Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano as a tribute to the death of language. If simple words like "dog" or "cup" can have different meanings to different people, how can the language communicate complex ideas like "love" or "desire?"
The Hypocrites first presented this play in a rough energetic version, through their interpretation of Absurdism -- high audience interaction, grotesquely comic, and without trying to apply an uncoded meaning to the script. At the point, the company thought that was the only way to make theater. But over the last decade, it has picked up a few other theatrical fascinations. The Hypocrites are interested in colliding its Absurdist past with its more eclectic present and seeing what product can come out of that tension. Sean Graney directs.
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