Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

    Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

    Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under the reign of Louis XIV, in which the petit bourgeois M. Jourdain aspires to aristocratic status, veers from mannered satire to a savage buffoonery. All manner…

  • The Killer

    The Killer

    The Bérenger plays of Ionesco – in which an ordinary man finds himself in a variety of situations – are what they are, but it can be illuminating to consider them in terms of artistic and literary movements. I tend to agree that they don’t exactly qualify as existentialist or absurdist. It is, granted, pretty…

  • Rhinoceros

    Rhinoceros

    What makes me the most glad to have seen the Théâtre de la Ville revival of Ionesco’s RHINOCEROS were the faces of the rhinoceri hovering in the air, with their beautiful sad eyes, sweet and brutish at the same time, animal yet with a germ of sympathy for the human. In the possible world of…

  • Exit the King

    Exit the King

    The Broadway revival of EXIT THE KING is an opportunity to revisit Ionesco‘s absurdist critique of the logical fallacies of political power and entitlement, even if, in this adapted version, the topical references are strained and overly obvious. Of the two leads, Geoffrey Rush comes off best. His mannerisms have always struck me as a…