No! No! Fourtimes no! I am not your daughter.

We sleep in the same bed.

I directed The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco 7 years ago in Portland, where the reviewers were at a loss (though that did not stop them from writing). Well, I’ve decided to direct it every 7 years until I die, like Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” films. I’m going to do it next in Eugene, Oregon in May.

So far, I’ve cast Heather, who played the maid in my first production, who’s going to reprise her role. Kelvin is going to be my fire chief and Scott’s going to design the poster and program.

I have spent a very pleasant afternoon.

I do not deny it.

You can read about the background of the play here and here.

At the age of 40 he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true.This feeling only intensified with the introduction in later lessons of the characters known as “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”. To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating into disjointed fragments of words. Ionesco set about translating this experience into a play.