NANCY C. JONES

THE LESSON by Ionesco

translated and directed by Nancy C. Jones

Slant Culture Theatre Festival, Louisville, KY

 

Featuring...

• Tim Hull as THE PROFESSOR

• Karyn Czar as THE MAID

• Alexis Slocum as THE STUDENT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Jones translates this classic piece of absurdist French Theatre with a contemporary spin. Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 classic one-act comedy about an insane professor tutoring a brick-brained student helped usher in the Theater of the Absurd. Though an obsequious maid warns the professor not to get too carried away by frustration, the professor’s growing exasperation leads to his increasingly loopy teachings. The student simply cannot grasp the most remedial aspects of mathematics or philology and suffers growing head pains in direct proportion to the rising lunacy of the professor’s lectures, until their mutual rage ascends to a lethally deranged pitch. Ionesco taps into every student’s worst nightmare in THE LESSON.