[Lahr is an American critic, nonfiction writer, playwright, and novelist. In the following tribute, he surveys the themes and techniques of Ionesco's works.]

Eugène Ionesco, who died last week, was an entrepreneur of his own uncertainties. "There are no alternatives," he said about his first, short play, The Bald Soprano (1950). "If man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, 'comic' in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy." Giddy with a sense of absence and of abdication, Ionesco's plays sounded a new note of frivolity at the beginning of the fifties which tweaked both the committed ideologues of the left and the boulevardiers of the right, and pushed theatre beyond the boundaries of logic and sociology. His plays often spoke in hilarious non sequiturs (The Bald Soprano; The Lesson, 1951; The Chairs, 1952), in the crazy symmetry of dreams (Victims of Duty, 1953), and in fantastical transformations (Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, 1954; Rhinoceros, 1960)—and they all announced a refusal to suffer while acting out the dislocation and the strange emptiness he found in the world.

Born in Romania in [1909], Ionesco spent most of his first thirteen years in France, dreaming alternately of being a saint and a warrior. Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven, he lived in Romania, and then he returned to Paris to live and write in his second language. His estrangement from his native tongue gave him a feeling for the confusion created by language and its inadequacy to make sense of reality, and also left him with an exile's rootlessness, which comes across in the floating world of his plays. His first experience of theatre, he wrote in 1958, was in Paris: growing up near the Luxembourg Gardens, he frequently watched puppet shows there. "I could stay there, entranced for whole days … spellbound by the sight of these puppets that talked, moved and clubbed each other. It was the spectacle of the world itself." Ionesco's plays, with their surrealist narratives and acid thoughts, almost immediately embroiled him with the literary establishment. "I think that writers like Sartre, Osborne, Miller, Brecht, etc., are simply the new auteurs du boulevard, representatives of a left-wing conformism which is just as lamentable as the right-wing sort," Ionesco, an anarchist in the face of all orthodoxies, wrote.

Ionesco was a pint-size renegade. He had a clown's face—a rutted forehead and a bald pate that gave him a memorably comical double-dome appearance. It seemed apt that he wrote clown plays that disguised their intellect and insolence in the high jinks of visual surprise. "The theatre is the appearance of the unexpected," he said. His best jokes were sight gags whose impact was multiplied by a comic exaggeration and conveyed, in lucid metaphors, an almost childlike appreciation of life's weirdness. In The Chairs, the stage is inundated with a whirlwind of seats for an invisible audience, which never comes to hear an orator who turns out to be mute; in Amédée, Ionesco's first full-length play, a couple share their apartment with a corpse (a symbol of their dead love), which gets bigger and bigger; in Rhinoceros, an allegory of totalitarian conformity, the world proliferates with rhinos. Ionesco's theatrical world was one of danger, disconnection, and daring. "Personally, I regard existence as a misfortune," he said. Ionesco was a kind of Zanni of remorse. As he lets a character in Jack, or the Submission (1955) sing, "There's no one else like me on earth / I'm full of light and gloom and mirth."