In the preface to the paperback edition of his book, Michael Y. Bennett responds to the scholarly reception of its first printing (in hardcover in 2011) and endeavours to clarify the book's aim and intention. The book is not meant to replace Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), he states. Rather it is meant to complement it, providing contrasting readings of absurdist plays, thereby ‘freeing’ these texts from a type of critical straitjacketing. Whereas Esslin posits that absurdist drama represents metaphysical anguish and hopelessness, Bennett submits that these plays ‘revolt against existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life meaningful’ (p. 2). He argues that plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet and Eugène Ionesco are not simply nihilistic but offer instruction in how to live meaningfully in an absurd situation.
Bennett proposes that playwrights dramatized this conundrum in the form of ethical parables, creating paradoxical, heterotopic plays that require the reader/audience member to make sense of them individually. He illustrates this by providing primarily textual analyses of four classic examples of the genre. In chapter 1, Bennett offers an optimistic account of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, suggesting that the play ‘has to do with becoming your own personal savior and biding time, especially with friends’ (p. 24). In chapter 2, the author presents Pinter's The Birthday Party as a parable of ‘an unhealthy family relationship that resembles Oedipus’ family due to their own inability to interrogate themselves and their own situation’ (p. 54; italics in original). In chapter 3, Bennett reads Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show as a ‘parable that forces whites to confront themselves’ (p. 73). Chapter 4 discusses Berenger, the protagonist of Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, as a Sisyphean hero who finds ‘something worth fighting and living for: his place in the world, despite what the world is like’ (p. 100). In the conclusion, the author considers how Beth Henley's 1978 play Crimes of the Heart might exemplify a ‘female absurd’ that highlights ‘the absurdity of one's subject position and offers a call to action’ (p. 25).
The author's proposal that the thematic label ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ be replaced with the term ‘parabolic drama’ (p. 3) arguably switches one partially useful but restrictive critical framework for another. While it is intriguing to read these plays as ethical parables, it is questionable whether this approach is always apt. The book's interpretations are sometimes strained. One suspects that these playwrights would be as leery of being grouped together as writers of ethical parables as they were of absurdist drama. The consideration of the ‘female absurd’ opens up a compelling line of investigation, but Bennett's treatment of it is truncated and tokenistic. The two addenda on parables seem like parts of a literature review that should have been better integrated into the study or else left out. The book also contains several typos, grammatical slips, and other copy-editing oversights. In sum, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd proves occasionally illuminating but uneven in its treatment of canonical twentieth-century plays.
