La Lecon

At the beginning of La Lecon, the pupil is admitted to the professor's study. She has ribbons in her hair, a vacuous stare, chewing gum, a copy of Elle, and a youthful, overpowering spontaneity. Her new tutor enters: striped necktie, fuzzy bead, stiff-bearing, and a fixed gaze which could be either intense or myopic. The lesson begins.

The professor naturally wants to improve the girl's grasp of fundamental principles, to insure that the knowledge she acquires will be a permanent protection against the chaos of experience. But his pupil is wholly deficient in logical capacity. The professor's efforts to impart the elements of mathematics only succeed in confusing her and stifling her enthusiasm. The girl is unable to go beyond simple addition, in spite of the professor's warning that all of life, philosophy and civilization consist in being able to disintegrate as well as integrate. If she can perform other operations (such as a ten-place multiplication problem) faultlessly, it is because she has learned them not by reason but by the same additive process--memorization. By the end of the arithmetic session, both characters are becoming exasperated. More and more, the professors dominates his unhappy pupil.

They proceed to study the elements of comparative linguistics. The professor outlines the history and theory of the "Neo-Spanish" tongues, which all share an identical vocabulary and grammar. This, of course, makes it impossible to tell them apart... By now the pupil is completely distracted thanks to a toothache, but the professor persists. His lesson, a mixture of sophistry and flights of fancy, is incomprehensible. At last, in the climactic scene, he holds up an imaginary object and orders the girl to repeat "knife" in each of the Neo-Spanish idioms. But her pain has become unbearable, she cannot obey, and he stabs her to death with the invisible knife. His triumph is complete.

Eugene Ionesco's "comic drama," which was performed in French last weekend by the Lowell House Theatre Francais under the direction of Eduardo Montoya '65, is an excellent satire. The provincial professor is a caricature of an academic personality, and his "lesson" is a parody of the warmed-over humanism with which such a person usually dignifies his futile calling.

Each time that Ionesco's hero is forced to offer a basic explanation for some function of the human mind, he can only allege a vague kind of universal intuition. How do we understand the principles of mathematics? "You can't explain it. You understand it by an internal, mathematical reasoning, ou've got it or you haven't." What distinguishes the identical Neo-Spanish languages from each other? "It's an ineffable something... No rule can be given. You must have a flair for it, that's all." How, finally, does it happen that ordinary people are able to communicate at all, since each speaks his own language? "It's simply one of the inexplicable peculiarities of the coarse empiricism of the masses...a paradox, a nonsense, one of the aberrations of human nature, it's instinct."

After such flounderings he is always glad to return to safe ground, to his "lesson," a petty combination of pedantry and sadism, punctuated by grotesque poetry such as that of his discourses on phonetics. Ionesco forces us to see the professor and his lesson as the pupil herself doubtless sees them, uncomprehending. The ridicule is so successful that the girl's inability--and unwillingness--to think emerge as virtues by comparison.

Montoya was very good in the lead role, both verbally and mimetically. As the professor became increasingly less fatuous and more monstruous, Montoya's characterization kept pace. He was fully able to express the variety of moods demanded by the part, from the timid but pompous gentleman of the beginning to the frenzied, lewd murderer of the climax. His fluent dialogue was matched by a physical command of the role, as much in his comic pantomimes before an invisible blackboard as in his sinister posture just before the murder, when he crouches next to his victim like something inhuman.

As the pupil, Beatrice Mathews showed a comic talent superior even to Montoya's. Seated next to the professor, casual and happy, she presented a picture of slightly stupid innocence. As her torture increased so did the variety of her facial and bodily expressions of boredom, pain and outrage. Her delivery, like Montoya's, was nuanced and fluent. This is especially important in performing Ionesco, since most of the playwright's humor is based on his genius for distorting or exaggerating the phrases and rhymes of everyday conversation.

Connie Christo brought to the part of the maid a bedraggled appearance and a resigned way of walking and speaking which well confirmed her statement at the end of the play that she has been a party to these lethal teacher student relations forty times a day ever since they began. The conclusion of the play inspires the monstrous vision of an endless succession of hapless pupils each turning up for the lesson which is to prepare her for adulthood, only to be done in and coffined by her instructor.