Avant-Garde Dramatists from Ibsen to Ionesco*

Since at least the days of Ibsen, avant-garde playwrights have persistently enacted a set of taxing and ambiguous roles in respect to their publics and their eras. They have again and again elected to serve as alienists and double agents—as psychoanalysts of a sort.

As alienists, the dramatists have struggled to re-present the alienated states of their publics so that these might be experienced more or less consciously now as private ills, now as public woes. Called in some sense to be ministers of a Higher Power, as Kierkegaard15 would say, but lacking ordination or mandate, they have generally been unwilling to make public claims to being “true legislators of Mankind.” Their “analytic” activities have generally had to be carried on without portfolio, in a para-analytic fashion. Among the countless guises they have assumed in the exercise of this responsibility, the following have been especially prominent in the recent past: goad, censor, scourge, judge, teacher, mentor, clown. It is no wonder that the public has never quite known whether the author was friend or foe, or some strange crossing of both.

This likeness in the orientations of outstanding playwrights to their publics shines through the differences in the manifest contents of their