‘The Bald Soprano’ begins with the reassuring familiarity of a British couple chatting at home—and then gleefully dismantles every expectation.
Mrs. Smith recounts the evening to her husband as they await their guests, the Martins, and a fire chief drops by. Yet in Eugène Ionesco’s landmark work of the Theatre of the Absurd, ordinary small talk soon collapses into linguistic mayhem. Reflecting Albert Camus’s view of life as fundamentally without purpose, the play turns conversation into noise: everyone speaks, but no one communicates.
The Resident Acting Company believes that “theatre is at its best when artists collaborate as a company.” This production of The Bald Soprano fulfills that ideal. Working as a cohesive ensemble, the six performers bring clarity to Ionesco’s deliberate confusion and extract every possible laugh from his absurd situations.
Photo Credit: Al Foote
Rachel Botchan portrays Mrs. Smith with a straight face even as the language around her grows increasingly chaotic. Her extensive stage, television, and audiobook experience serves the role well. Dominic Cuskern, a veteran of Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theater, national tours, and film, plays Mr. Smith, delivering nonsensical truisms with Shakespearean gravity. Their discussion of Bobby Watson slips effortlessly between reality and absurdity: they acknowledge that he has been dead for four years, speak of him as though he were alive and engaged to another Bobby Watson, then gossip about whom his widow might marry. Botchan and Cuskern handle these dizzying shifts flawlessly.
Photo Credit: Al Foote
Anique Clements and Andy Paterson play the visiting Martins. Clements, known for roles in classical and contemporary theater, brings expressive range to Mrs. Martin, while Paterson draws on extensive regional and New York credits as Mr. Martin. Their comic timing is impeccable as the characters slowly “discover” that they have met before. Each revelation compounds the absurdity: both are from Manchester, rode the same train to London in second class, live at the same house on Bromfield Street, sleep in the same bed, and have a two-year-old daughter. At last, they conclude that they must be husband and wife.
Photo Credit: Al Foote
Veteran actor Dan Daily plays the Fire Chief. An award-winning Off-Broadway and film performer who appeared in the Pearl Theatre’s 2011 production of The Bald Soprano, Daily makes a welcome return to Ionesco’s absurd world. His Fire Chief is disappointed to find no blaze at the Smiths’ home, and the couple promises to call if one breaks out. While waiting for something to happen, he joins the Smiths and Martins in telling stories that make no sense. Carine Montbertrand brings equal distinction to Mary, the maid. A classically trained performer and expert in Commedia dell’Arte mask work and physical theater, she uses expressive body language to enrich the role. Mary tells her own story and reveals that she is the Fire Chief’s lover before the Smiths push her from the room.
Photo Credit: Al Foote
After the Fire Chief leaves, the Smiths and Martins trade increasingly nonsensical truisms until conversation disintegrates into argument. No one communicates, and nothing is resolved. The lights fade; when they rise again, the Martins sit where the Smiths began, repeating the play’s opening lines and restarting the cycle.
More than 76 years after Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano, its portrait of people talking past one another feels startlingly current. The six-member ensemble races through the escalating verbal chaos with precision, making this 70-minute production both uproariously funny and quietly unsettling. By the final repetition, the laughter catches in the throat: Ionesco’s absurd world looks uncomfortably like our own.
