The Absurd of Ionesco Takes the Odyssey Stage

Thirty years after directing and choreographing the Odyssey Theatre’s award-winning West Coast premiere, and following a wildly successful Off Broadway revival at the York Theatre last season, Bill Castellino reunites with musical director Gerald Sternbach to charm audiences with a revitalized, updated version of “Ionescopade” through August 11 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. in Westwood.
Taken from the plays, playlets and poetry of “Theatre of the Absurd” playwright Eugène Ionesco (“Rhinoceros,” “The Bald Soprano,” “Exit the King”), “Ionescopade” is a zany musical vaudeville featuring mime, farce and parody—all hilariously balanced on the edge of madness.
Conceiver/original director Robert Allan Ackerman and composer/lyricist Mildred Kayden were Ionesco’s guests in his Paris apartment while creating the work.
Kayden, now 90, remained friends with Ionesco until his death in 1994. “He was always very loving and warm,” she says. “He always insisted that life is funny. We need to look at life and find the humor in it, or we can’t take it.”
“‘Ionescopade’ is a vaudeville, so it’s episodic, fast-moving, a little naughty and very, very funny,” explains Castellino.
“When I first approached it in 1982, I saw it as an entertaining, silly evening of non-sequitors,” he says. “Thirty years later, it all makes a new kind of sense. The world around the play has changed. Continuous access to information, multi-tasking and endless news cycles make seeming non-sequitors normal in daily life. Like a true piece of art, Ionesco’s work lived during his time, and now it continues to live in other periods.
“Ionesco wrote during and after World War II in France, and his plays were impacted by the Nazi occupation, repression, informants, paranoia and liberation. Now, in a post-9/11 world, these topics resonate afresh, and that’s fascinating to me. Humanity uses laughter to survive oppression. ‘Ionescopade’ shines light on this very human resilience.”
Performances are on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets ($30), call (310) 477-2055 or visit odysseytheatre.com.