From Absurd to AI: Theater for the Age of Anxiety

Catalog description

"Theater of the Absurd" is a critical category that emerged at the height of the cold war to describe a new form of post-WWII drama. While it was generally believed that this category outlived its usefulness with the end of the historical paradigm within which it emerged, it becomes increasingly clear that it has a unique capacity to address contemporary phenomena, from climate change to AI, which emerged at the same time as this form of theater. We will explore the plays by canonical authors such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Adrianne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Edward Albee, and others, not as well-known but no less deserving playwrights such as Tewfik al Hakim, Slawomir Mrozek, Jose Trijana, and Kobo Abe. We will venture beyond dramatic literature to explore philosophical and historical sources of the absurd, critics who defined it (Martin Esslin, Jan Kott), and theater makers (Peter Brook, Pina Bausch) who engaged with it in performance.