Theater Of The Absurd Quotes

Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.

[Waiting for Godot] has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.

We turned to my questions about the Edison. How many blood tests did Theranos perform on the device? That too was a trade secret, they said. I felt like I was watching a live performance of the Theater of the Absurd.

What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd!

That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.

Hamm: What's he doing? (CLOV raises lid of NAGG's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.) Clov: He's crying. (He closes lid, straightens up) Hamm: Then he's living.

Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story. ("Introduction")

The theater of the absurd represented a contrast to realistic theater. Its aim was to show the lack of meaning in life in order to get the audience to disagree. The idea was not to cultivate the meaningless. On the contrary. But by showing and exposing the absurd in ordinary everyday situations, the onlookers are forced to seek a truer and more essential life for themselves.

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.

Estragon: Acaba beraber olmasaydık ikimiz için de daha hayırlı olmaz mıydı? (sahneyi baştan başa geçer, tümseğe oturur.) Aynı yolun yolcuları değiliz aslında. Vladimir: (kızmadan) Orası belli değil. Estragon: Doğru, hiçbir şey belli değil. (Vladimir sahneyi baştan başa geçer, Estragon'un yanına oturur.) Vladimir: Her zaman ayrılabiliriz; bizim için daha iyi olacağına inanıyorsan. Estragon: Artık değmez. (sessizlik) Vladimir: Doğru, artık değmez. (sessizlik) Estragon: Eee, gidelim mi? Vladimir: Evet, gidelim. (Kımıldamazlar.)

We're living in a strange, complex epoch. As Hamlet says, our 'time is out of joint.' Just think. We're reaching for the moon and yet it's increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves; we're able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality; we build superb communications between the continents, and yet communication between Man and Man is increasingly difficult. In other words, our life has lost a sort of higher axis, and we are irresistibly falling apart, more and more profoundly alienated from the world, from others, from ourselves. Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own absurdity. Never before has Man lived projected so near to the very brink of the insoluble conflict between the subjective will of his moral self and the objective possibility of its ethical realization. Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is.

Arian's ebony hair was spread in a shimmering fan around her shoulders, reminding Tristan absurdly of Snow White in her glass coffin. Even in death, hadn't the deceptive blush of life stained Snow White's pallid cheeks? Hadn't her rosebud lips parted as if to welcome a kiss from a prince who might never come? Hadn't the creamy swell of her breasts tantalized every hopelessly naive kid in the theater into daring to believe her chest would rise just one more time?

...if love...is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not 'cosa mentale,' at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture. - For an artist therefore, the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.

Having been a senator, I was well versed in the politics of standing ovations at the SOTU: the ritualized spectacle in which members of the president’s party leapt to their feet and cheered to the rafters at practically every third line, while the opposition party refused to applaud even the most heartwarming story for fear that the cameras might catch them consorting with the enemy. (The sole exception to this rule was any mention of troops overseas.) Not only did this absurd bit of theater highlight the country’s divisions at a time when we needed unity; the constant interruptions added at least fifteen minutes to an already long speech. I had considered beginning my address by asking all those in attendance to hold their applause, but unsurprisingly, Gibbs and the comms team had nixed the idea, insisting that a silent chamber would not play well on TV.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off. I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet? The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling. It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

During the latter three centuries the process itself of their existence has become such that in the presences of most of them during their daily existence those 'being-confrontative-associations' almost no longer arise, which usually proceed in three-brained beings thanks to every kind of new perception, and from which alone can data be crystallized in the common presences of three-brained beings for their own individuality. Well then, when your favorites, existing in such a manner in their 'daily life,' go to these contemporary theaters and follow the senseless manipulations of these contemporary actors, and receive 'shocks' one after the other from every kind of reminiscence, already previously perceived, of not less senseless and absurd notions, then during this waking state of theirs, they willy-nilly obtain more or less tolerable being-associations, so that when they go home and go to bed they sleep much better than usual.

Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation contemplation of life in all its conditionality’. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific ‘influences’ stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes—a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as Bulgakov’s novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita. The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it, Bulgakov’s wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical situation from the same cultural basis.

During the latter three centuries the process itself of their existence has become such that in the presences of most of them during their daily existence those 'being-confrontative-associations' almost no longer arise, which usually proceed in three-brained beings thanks to every kind of new perception, and from which alone can data be crystallized in the common presences of three-brained beings for their own individuality. Well then, when your favorites, existing in such a manner in their 'daily life,' go to these contemporary theaters and follow the senseless manipulations of these contemporary actors, and receive 'shocks' one after the other from every kind of reminiscence, already previously perceived, of not less senseless and absurd notions, then during this waking state of theirs, they willy-nilly obtain more or less tolerable being-associations, so that when they go home and go to bed they sleep much better than usual. Although indeed these contemporary theaters with all that proceeds in them happen to be in this way--but of course only 'for today'--an excellent means for better sleep, nevertheless the objectively evil consequences of these theaters for beings, and particularly for the rising generation, are incalculable. The chief harm for them from these theaters is that they are an additional factor for the complete destruction in them of all possibilities of ever possessing the need, proper to three-brained beings, called the 'need-for-real-perceptions.

A story without a resolution, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, falls into the “Theater of the Absurd.” A science paper without a resolution falls into the reject bin.

But in a certain sense Schiller is, of course, an exception. Throughout all his works, from The Robbers to William Tell, we find a passionate revolt against the exercise of blind force by the authorities, and the sublime eloquence of the language in which that revolt is couched has given many people the courage to hope that someday this revolt might be successful. But none of these works contain the slightest indication of any knowledge on Schiller’s part that his revolt against the absurd decrees of established authority was fueled by the early experiences stored in his body. His sufferings at the hands of his frightening, power-crazed father drove him to write. But he could not recognize the motivation behind that urge. His sole aim was to produce great and lasting literature. He sought to express the truth he found embodied in historical figures, and he achieved that aim with outstanding success. But the whole truth about the way he suffered at the hands of his father finds no mention. This suffering remained a closed book to him, all the way up to his early death. It remained a mystery both to him and to the society of theater-goers and readers that has admired him for centuries and chosen him as an example to live up to because of his espousal of the cause of liberty and truth in his works. But that truth was not the whole truth, merely the truth acknowledged as such by society.

The Theater of the Absurd plays shared a point of view that life is absurd, pointless, meaningless—that words can’t help us, and the afterlife won’t help either, so live now and find something funny because it’s a waste of time trying to figure anything out since we’re all going to die anyway.

Hitler, even more than Stalin, had proved himself a master of demoralization, for he was able to release in others the most destructive forces of the unconscious. In the course of a dozen years he had popularized every mode of human debasement. He even employed physicians who had taken the Hippocratic oath to perform loathsome pseudo-scientific tortures upon human beings, such as none but psychotics could entertain even in fantasy. On the world stage, Hitler turned the original 'Theater of the Absurd' into a 'Theater of the Cruel': and the avant-garde theaters that now glorify these psychotic manifestations are so many vulgar testimonials to Hitler's overwhelming success.

Then, it was easier to build the need for love and sex into the end-all purpose of life, avoiding personal commitment to truth in a catch-all commitment to "home" and "family." . . . . Irwin Shaw, who once goaded the American conscience on the great issues of war and peace and racial prejudice now wrote about sex and adultery; Norman Mailer and the young beatnik writers confined their revolutionary spirit to sex and kicks and drugs and advertising themselves in four-letter words. It was easier and more fashionable for writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: "the theater of the absurd." Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.

Elias’s view of reality was distorted and that he actually believed he could talk his way out of the whole affair. He was trying to sell the court as he had sold FMC and Kerr-McGee. When the video stopped Elias’s testimony quickly deteriorated into the theater of the absurd. He rambled without prompting, his thoughts frequently disjointed and defiant. He maintained that the tank left AEI empty, and any statements attributed to him to the contrary were “fantasy.” He said the material trucked to Evergreen from AEI was actually Kerr-McGee material he had previously trucked to AEI to turn into fertilizer and not the cadmium-bearing FMC material. He blamed the workers for their own injuries. He called OSHA overzealous and said they found no violations. He blamed Bill Brugger for the Tesco American litigation. At every opportunity he elevated himself and his efforts to get AEI and Evergreen working, saying it took “fortitude.

What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd!

Lesbians were, in the public image, loathsome creatures. They were seen as hard, sophisticated females who seduced innocent girls or women into mysterious “perversions,” or as sad caricatures of men, trying to dress and act as males, and generally aping some of men’s worst characteristics. Hollywood made “butchy” women into repellent monsters, vampires, or other subhuman creatures, and the theater portrayed practitioners of the love that dares not speak its name as neurotic, tragic, or absurd. No woman in her right mind would want to be seen so negatively. No actress admitting to loving women would be a success.

Andy Cohen: She followed in the footsteps of our other Housewives and did a song next, naturally. The more songs the better, as far as I’m concerned. It’s theater of the absurd.

Cat owners is a term that belongs to the theater of the absurd, as both parties are aware. Blessed are the cat-mad, for they shall be driven up the wall. The cat poured itself off his shoulder like a caramel and sat down on the counter, gazing devotedly at the refrigerator. What ultimately means most to a cat is to be the center of consideration. It is the only thing about which they never become cynical or disillusioned. The slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent and enigmatic. When they fail at charming us, they move so swiftly to the next meditation that we are hardly aware there has been an attempt, much less a failure.

Colditz is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, and much else besides: bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity, tragedy, and farce. Colditz Castle was a frightening prison, but it was also frequently absurd, a place of suffering but also of high comedy, an idiosyncratic and eccentric crucible that evolved its own culture, cookery, sports, theater, and even a distinct internal language.

The rise of the theater of the absurd, it has been argued, "seems to mirror the change in the predominant form of mental disorders which has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists. " Whereas the "classical" drama of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen turned on conflicts associated with classical neuroses, the absurdist theater of Albee, Beckett, loncsco, and Genet centers on the emptiness, isolation, loneliness, and despair experienced by the borderline personality. The affinity between the theater of the absurd and the borderline's "fear of close relationships, " "attendant feelings of helplessness, loss, and rage," "fear of destructive impulses, " and "fixation to early omnipotence" inheres not only in the content of these plays but-more to the point of the present discussion-in their form. The contemporary playwright abandons the effort to portray coherent and generally recognized truths and presents the poet's personal intuition of truth. The characteristic devaluation of language, vagueness as to time and place, sparse scenery, and lack of plot development evoke the barren world of the borderline, his lack of faith in the growth or development of object relations, his "often stated remark that words do not matter, only action is important," and above all his belief that the world consists of illusions. "Instead of the neurotic character with well-structured conflicts centering around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real." This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallizes in an imagery of the absurd that reenters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence, a kind of absurdist theater of the self.

If Reagan’s story were fiction, it would seem absurdly pat and overdetermined, the irony too heavy-headed. Out of college during the Depression, he went straight to work for the new fantasy-industrial complex. In a Des Moines radio studio, he regularly pretended he was at Wrigley Field in Chicago, performing fake play-by-play broadcasts of Cubs games based on real-time wire-service descriptions. He visited Hollywood and got his first movie role — playing a radio announcer. During World War II he was an officer in the army — serving in the First Motion Picture Unit, stationed in Burbank and Culver City, where he starred in "This Is the Army," a movie in which he played a corporal who stages a piece of musical theater called "This Is the Army.

God created the world in six days and it is difficult for us to perceive the greatness of the primary information, unless we understand a work of inner transformation or the need for a more secure future for the next generation! The immediate answer is cold and false and it has a tinge of emotional therapy. Only the inner acceptance of reality has a dose of pure truth and can generate the echo of the self that may give us a middle way in our own vision of how to avoid the evil that extends and takes over the world! Is the deceptive tranquility of the silence that conquers us, a collective passivity that reigns over the weak, frightened and cowardly people, fueled by mediocrity and the vain hope into a better future. What happens now in this world is an ancient Greek tragedy, in which we like actors that can no longer tell the stage from reality. It is like in a therapy-drama, seen as a solution for those who had traumatic experiences in their life and cannot communicate through words. It is those who choose a non-verbal language and who saw their hands in desperation, as they can no longer articulate words. They communicate like primitive people after the discovery of fire. Others are playing their role in a theater of the absurd, like some amateur actors or as mimes in a stand-up comedy show where self-deprecation is adored. Depending on each one’s perception power, different ways of expression are chosen, perhaps more superficial and well-anchored in the context of the drama we are living to the full. It is a false sense of inner security, a mere relief valve for our emotional expression and a recipe for disaster! Why is it that nothing good and fair happens in this world anymore? Is the evil perpetuating itself in shapes and patterns we are no longer capable to distinguish from the good and the right? Why are we deceiving ourselves? “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” But who, how, why, for whom, by whom, what, and in particular when ? Lucian Ciuchita

Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Having been a senator, I was well versed in the politics of standing ovations at the SOTU: the ritualized spectacle in which members of the president’s party leapt to their feet and cheered to the rafters at practically every third line, while the opposition party refused to applaud even the most heartwarming story for fear that the cameras might catch them consorting with the enemy. (The sole exception to this rule was any mention of troops overseas.) Not only did this absurd bit of theater highlight the country’s divisions at a time when we needed unity;

Leadership, Boal concluded, is the art of facilitating imaginative interventions by the greatest possible number...