The Wrong Lesson

...By all means, go see it...

...A totalitarian state, Orwell noted in his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," tries to destroy the meaning of words-suggesting that words do have an intrinsic meaning, and that only once this is lost can the state gain absolute psychological control...

...Ionesco, by contrast, has over the years merely become more garrulous...

...Director Jack Gar-fein, and Joseph Wiseman (the Professor) both fail to seize on the driving mechanism of the piece: the Professor's slowly rising anger and hatred, which ineluctably ends in the stabbing...

...Ralph Alswang and Michael White have designed garish lighting effects (the murder scene is bathed in an eerie blue), and Alswang's sets look slapdash...

...Put this on," she says, "and you need never be afraid...

...This study, directed by Walter F. Parkes and Keith F. Critchlow, of how the underside of American life can intersect with a psychopathological will to power is intelligent, well-made— and harrowing...

...Having just dispatched his pretty pupil-his 40th victim-the Professor becomes frightened...

...His maid offers him a swastika armband...

...The current production at the Harold Clurman Theater descends to the level of the play...

...But skip The Lesson...

...Ionesco's position, far from being a battle cry against totalitarianism, is really an invitation to it...

...Didi Conn (the Student) is too kittenish and coy in a part whose keynote is ingenuousness...

...The relationship between politics and language described in The Lesson is also cheaply bought...

...Still, the increasing tenuousness of Beckett's plays reflects a certain courage in pursuing the implications of his stance...

...The shift from doddering, friendly don to murderer is much too abrupt...

...To the entire business one can only reply, as Kenneth Tynan did a few years ago, that discourse is possible and desirable...

...When the illusion evaporates, there are two possible responses: One can face the void courageously, as Ionesco presumes he does, or one can seek safety in ideologies or in the masses, as the Professor of The Lesson does...

...On purely utilitarian grounds a case can be made: The play has only three characters, one set, and provides a certain kick-a combination that makes it appealing to many of the small, habitually impoverished companies dedicated to "serious" works...

...It isn't...

...As in Rhinoceros, the anarchic author here takes aim at what he considers the worm at the core of Western civilization: Aristotelian (read, common sense) logic, or the law of non-contradiction, and its linguistic corollary that one can speak sensibly about the world...

...Thus the theme of the play: "Philology leads to calamity...

...Their complaint is that the anti-Nazi message is too subtle...

...The rest of those involved aren't much help either...

...The calamity referred to is on one level the death of the Student, who, unable to follow the professor's distinction between the pronunciation of Spanish and neo-Spanish, is knifed by him...

...Fanatics of varying persuasions have been picketing the theater, shouting catchy slogans like "The Nazis and the Klan/Are the scum of the land...

...Sandra Seacat (the Maid) gives a disgracefully ill-conceived performance-her words ring flat, as though she were reading them in a trance, and even when she manages to impart some life she comes across as annoyingly oversolicitous...

...The Lesson is part of a double bill that also features a documentary film, California Reich...

...For Ionesco, meaning is an illusion people grasp for in the desperate hope of preventing a confrontation with meaninglessness, death, the abyss...

...But esthetically and intellectually, The Lesson is pathetic-a feeble absurdist melodrama wearing metaphysical rags...

...Samuel Beckett has been demonstrating for some years that if one accepts the impossibility of communication, one must eventually reach a point of absolute silence...

...Consisting of interviews and footage of the family and "professional" life of California's Nazis, the movie has become a focus of controversy...

...If it were not, why bother writing...

...On a deeper level, though, it is clearly Fascism-the refuge of little men...

...it robs the play of whatever slight dramatic interest it has...