Eugène Ionesco wrote his first play because he could not endure the theater. In Notes and Counter Notes, Ionesco stated frankly, “I really hated the theatre. It bored me” (22). He found the themes to be trite, stage trickery obviously contrived, and longed for a theater that was reminiscent of the Guignol Marionette shows he frequented as a boy in the Luxembourg Gardens. The menacing world of those “Punch and Judy-style” puppets mesmerized him, and Ionesco connected to their “strange and improbable grotesque and brutal nature of the truth” that, for him, was “truer than true” (20). Ionesco began writing for the theater by chance, “with the intention of holding it up to ridicule,” and his first play, The Bald Soprano, attempted to parody the theater that he deplored (Notes and Counter Notes 25). In this early work that he subtitled an “antiplay,” he hoped to “drain the sense from the hollowest clichés of everyday language” and to “render the strangeness that seems to pervade our whole existence” (25). In Ionesco’s Imperatives, Rosette Lamont emphatically states that “it is inaccurate to call him an absurdist playwright” as he is “inherently an optimist” (40). Lamont classified his plays as “metaphysical farces” (with Ionesco’s imprimatur) where philosophical thought is presented under the “explosive, subversive, liberating anarchy of laughter” (68). Ionesco considered his works for the theater to be “avant-garde,” and they remain remarkably relevant today.In this piece, I reflect on three works by Ionesco: The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs, which I attended during the “post”-pandemic summer of July 2022 in Paris. La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) and La Leçon (The Lesson) premiered in 1950 and 1951, respectively, and have been running in repertoire at the diminutive Théâtre de la Huchette in the Latin Quarter since 16 February 1957. Seeing these works in this tiny space is like watching a theater history textbook spring to life. Each week, The Bald Soprano plays at 7 p.m. and The Lesson at 8 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, with English supertitles added for the Wednesday evening performance. The theater is nestled at 23 rue de la Huchette, one block from the Seine, among restaurateurs hawking kebabs and prix fixe menus catering to tourists. Each night, a small throng of people gather outside the theater, when ten minutes before curtain the doors open and audience members rush to find a spot in one of the eighty-five general admission seats. With no air conditioning, during the summer months handheld fans and programs flap wildly as a pre-show overture. The audience at the Huchette is not the hip Parisian crowd that one sees in other small theaters: for the most part these are students and visitors seeking a glimpse of Paris’s rich artistic history. Each summer, I bring University of Kentucky Education Abroad students to attend these plays, and, having seen them over a dozen times, I have inhabited the repetitive cycle of the Theatre of the Absurd. As the curtain rises each evening, the audience is transported to post–World War II Paris and the avant-garde philosophical milieu of Beauvoir and Sartre.Ionesco considered The Bald Soprano his best play. Inspired by his study of English using the Assimil language method, according to Ionesco, “a whole section of the play is made by stringing together phrases” taken from the manual (Notes and Counter Notes 177). The play’s action centers around The Smiths and The Martins, two bourgeois English couples who engage in illogical dialogue and tell ludicrous stories. Maintaining the original staging by Nicolas Bataille, and Jacques Noël’s scenic design with green painted flats that caricature a bourgeois English parlor, the Huchette production preserves Ionesco’s desire to “push burlesque to its extreme limits” (Notes and Counter Notes 182). As the play begins, Ionesco’s stage directions are proclaimed over the sound system, and audience members (who are typically very familiar with the text) chuckle as each absurd line unfolds:With this, Ionesco sets his “experiment in abstract or nonrepresentational drama” in motion (Notes and Counter Notes 181). Visually, the costumes are a carbon copy of the original: Mrs. Smith wears a floor-length skirt and high collared blouse, and Mr. Smith sports a tailcoat, vest, and throat-clenching tie. Mrs. Martin’s traveling clothes consist of a floor-length cotton dress and a straw boater hat with a violet ribbon and matching gloves, one of the many markers of the production’s nod to a distant past. Ionesco was absolute in his aesthetic demands for actors: “They must not be afraid of not being natural” (Notes and Counter Notes 26). The rotating crop of actors who embody these characters at the Huchette are practiced in what Ionesco refers to as “playing against the text” and manage to embrace the solemn formality of the production that is grafted onto an absurd, wild, and comic script (Notes and Counter Notes 27). The embrace between Mr. and Mrs. Martin (at the end of the scene in which they ludicrously recognize each other) is drawn from a melodrama handbook, replete with a twirling dip and contactless kiss. Mrs. Smith’s opening monologue is perfectly and consistently timed, as each word is threaded precisely through her stage action with an invisible embroidery needle and hoop. The unchanging costumes, set, props, and mannered staging are part of the charm of an evening at the Huchette, providing a souvenir of Ionesco’s theatrical and philosophical objectives.Those who stay to see The Lesson must exit the theater through a bleak hallway and return with a new throng to be reseated, another rule ostensibly grounded in the Huchette’s traditions. During the brief intermission, Noël’s scenic flats are reversed to become the red parlor for The Lesson. The stage space is even smaller for this second play, wherein actors replicate director Marcel Cuvelier’s staging that involves a Rubik Cube–style navigation of a petite table with two straight-backed chairs on either side. The professor is typically played by an actor in his fifties (or sixties), and the same actress is cast in the role of the maid for both The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, another practice that has held fast since 1952 (Au Programme 23). The young woman who portrays the Student must manage the rapid-fire dialogue, precise stage business, and remarkably difficult emotional trajectory of this character. The student wears a red-and-white checked dress with a Peter Pan collar, puffy sleeves, and a dirndl skirt; she arrives in short white gloves and red Mary Jane shoes, clutching the typical red-book satchel of French school children. The maid ushers the student onstage, then leaves her alone to fetch the professor; while waiting, she anxiously sits and removes her gloves by biting the tip of each finger to ease them off her hand. This slightly seductive bit of stage business is enacted with the same meticulous timing and precision in each performance, year after year. Actors seem content following a decades-old playbook, which they adhere to religiously. Though I’ve seen nearly a dozen different thespians play the Student in my visits to the Huchette, the evening that I attended in July 2022, there was a new actress playing the role, who (according to Huchette’s Administrateur Gonzague Phélip when he spoke to me before the show) was quite nervous. With her wide-eyed naiveté and close attention to detail, Nina Cruveiller had remarkable facility with Ionesco’s complex text and a close connection to the actor who played the professor. She seemed visibly relieved during the curtain call and her broad smile reflected her delight at having handled Ionesco’s fifty-minute theatrical roller coaster ride.In stark contrast to these museum pieces, I saw the final performance of Ionesco’s The Chairs at Théâtre de Poche, the site of the original production of The Lesson, in Montparnasse. Director Stéphanie Tesson explained that selecting Ionesco’s play for the season was easy as the theater’s chairs tell the story of the space (“Interview”). Rather than the larger stage on the main floor, Tesson chose the underground cave, as she felt its crowded intimacy would heighten the cacophony and explosive nature of the play (“Interview”). The theater’s recognizable red metal chairs proliferated in the black box with its claustrophobic low ceiling. The narrow “voms” between audience sections functioned as entrances and exits as chairs were frenetically carried into the playing space. In a mimetic nod to the impending sold-out play, ushers added last-minute seats to accommodate the burgeoning underground crowd. The final 9 p.m. performance was Thursday, 28 June, and the congested, sweltering cellar was a vivid representation of Parisian’s adoration of Ionesco. Tesson cast celebrated actress Catherine Salviat (sociétaire of Comédie-Française) as The Old Woman and veteran film, television, and stage actor Jean-Paul Farré (Molière Award 2010) to play The Old Man. These two veteran actors brought an effervescence to the characters that was reminiscent of children at play in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Salviat as the Old Woman, Semiramis, was masterful, radiant, and mercurial in her love and energetic care for her aging husband. Farré portrayed The Old Man with empathy and a naïve exuberance that belied his dementia with a clownlike innocence. Their costumes, designed by Corinne Rossi and painted by Marguerite Danguy des Déserts, mimicked the ubiquitous chairs in lush tones of red with bright touches of gold—providing a palimpsestic sense of a Ukrainian storybook. The acting, costumes, scenery, and production concept worked together seamlessly to bring a fresh and timely perspective on Ionesco’s masterpiece to a contemporary stage. The production was enthusiastically received by the crowd the evening I attended, as actors returned numerous times to the stage when the applause refused to subside during the curtain call. There was a final surprise when Marie-France Ionesco (the playwright’s daughter) was introduced from the front row at the end of this historic evening. She stood (with the help of a companion) and acknowledged the audience, stating simply that her father would have loved the production. The program elaborated on her appreciation of the work:Tesson and the artistic team of The Chairs hoped to reconnect with the “tradition of a post-war theater which saw the Poche grow and which made its reputation in the 1950s” (“Interview”). Their innovative, imaginative production succeeded and illuminated the play’s relevance today.Ionesco felt that “the revolutionary playwright feels he is running counter to his time,” but it is clear that his wit and wisdom are as pertinent today as they were seventy years ago (Notes and Counter Notes 41). In a world in which totalitarianism is on the rise, and the threat of global warming is shockingly revealed on a daily basis, it seems that Ionesco has become the voice of reason. We need his theatrical voice now more than ever. Ionesco may have hated the theater, but the love and need for Ionesco’s theater endures.