Celebrity Graveland

November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994

There are absurdist playwrights. Then there is Eugène Ionesco.

Born in Romania, Ionesco spent most of his youth in France. He would alternate between the two countries depending upon whether there was a war or not, but eventually, he settled with is family in Paris. Following a transcendental experience in which he found himself awestruck by a crystal clear, sunny day in the idyllic French countryside as a young man, he was taken by how juxtaposed that feeling was to the actual world around him…which he regarded as decaying and monotonous. The moment would have a lasting impression on his life and his art.

Ionesco mainly wrote plays. His first play, a one-act called The Bald Soprano, set in motion what was to be his lasting contribution to the artform. Devolving from mundane conversation into a string of non-sequiturs, the main characters in The Bald Soprano are trapped in a cycle of absurdity and inanity.

And it’s hilarious!

He followed this with dozens of other shows, both short-form and long. His other most well-known works are arguably 1952’s The Chairs, in which an older couple entertain a growing number of invisible guests and 1959’s Rhinoceros, a cautionary tale about the rise of conformity and fascism where everyone in the play slowly turns into, well…a rhinoceros.

Rhinoceros also continued the use of a recurring everyman character, Bérenger, who not only acts as the audience’s conduit into the world of the plays, but also stands in, somewhat autobiographically, for Ionesco himself.

Ionesco was fascinated by humanity’s shared experience of this life, that we all find ways to deal with the irrationality of the world around us, and that – in the end – death comes for us all. Well, death did come for him at the age of 84. Fortunately for audiences for generations to come, he left behind many ways to help us make sense of the absurdity all around us.

Burial

Montparnasse Cemetery – Paris, FRANCE

Specific Location

Division 6; At the intersection of Avenue Principale and Allée Lenoir.

This entry was posted on January 1, 2024 at 8:23 am and is filed under Montparnasse Cemetery with tags Montparnasse Cemetery, Playwrights, Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.