Absurdism - the class

Today, I had my first non-softball class. A 3 hour seminar on Theater of the Absurd, which involves some of my least favorite playwrights, and a bunch of PhD students. This could get ugly. Fortunately, it also involves a bunch of 2nd year MFAs who are both cool and also petrified by this class. (We shared our issues as well as the story of the Fireball over hot dogs at Oh Betty's).

I can tell already that this class will be a challenge and probably a pain. But I am taking the "Embrace what you don't know" approach to things. This will be interesting, as the professor emphasized that everyone bring their own expertise, which seems to be a distinctly grad-level thing. The assumption is that you know something. Unfortunately, what I know is that I think Beckett is pretentious, Pinter is a misogynist, and I will never understand Parks. And being a purist, I think Ibsen is more significant than Beckett. And that every time he mentioned influences like Dada or Surrealism, I connected with art and not literature.

Then again, I felt positioned in a strangely comfortable place, between scholarship and artistry. Because I can do both as a theatre historian. We'll see if this place becomes a weird chasm into which I fall.