For the last half century, French playwriting's been dominated by two masters of language who in some ways couldn't be less French: the Irishman Samuel Beckett and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco. Beckett's small, somber tributes to the human spirit's gift for negativity are familiar friends to New Yorkers, but Ionesco, who died in 1994 at the age of 82, has nearly slipped off our radar screen. It's understandable: Where Beckett's work shrank into ever tinier intensities, Ionesco's expanded, evolving from his taut early one-acts into free-flowing, multi-character dreamscapes. And where Beckett made his own immaculate English versions, Ionesco, linguistically twice-removed, has always depended on the kindness of translators, some of whom have been... More >>>