(UNION, NJ) -- Kean University Theatre Department presents The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco from April 10-18, 2026 in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center. Has your day-to-day life begun to feel like some surreal hallucination?
Have you ever looked into the eyes of someone you love and discovered you don’t know them? Or been in the midst of a conversation and realized that the words sound like gibberish?
Perhaps you’ve looked at the time and thought, “That can’t be right!” Does reality itself seem to be fraying at the edges?
If so, you’re in good company! Come join the Smiths and the Martins as they try to make sense of life and each other, with the help of the Mary the Maid and the Fire Captain, in Eugène Ionesco’s Absurd comic masterpiece, The Bald Soprano.
Performances take place Friday, April 10 at 7:30pm; Saturday, April 11 at 2:00pm & 7:30pm; Sunday, April 12 at 2:00pm; Wednesday, April 15 at 7:30pm; Thursday, April 16 at 5:30pm (post-show Q&A); Friday, April 17 at 10:00am (post-show Q & A) & 7:30pm; and Saturday, April 18 at 2 pm and 7:30pm. Tickets are available for purchase online. The Bauer Boucher Theatre Center is located in Vaugh-Eames Hall (1000 Morris Avenue) in Union, New Jersey.
The production comes from a translation by Tina Howe and is directed by E. Teresa Choate.
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-born French playwright. He studied in Bucharest and Paris, where he lived from 1945. His first one-act antiplay, The Bald Soprano (1950), inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd. He followed it with other one-act plays in which illogical events create an atmosphere both comic and grotesque, including The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and The New Tenant (1955). His most popular full-length play, Rhinoceros (1959), concerns a provincial French town in which all the citizens are metamorphosing into rhinoceroses. Other plays include Exit the King (1962) and A Stroll in the Air (1963). He was elected to the Acadmie Franaise in 1970.
The Kean University Department of Theatre offers students the knowledge, skills, and critical perspectives necessary for building a strong foundation for a lifelong engagement with their art and their world, as well as providing a core educational foundation based on the liberal arts. The department offers BA and BFA degree programs, constructed to make and teach theatre that celebrates the human condition and spirit.
Their performance series provides quality, applied experiences through which students can explore and develop their potential as actors, educators, directors, stage managers, designers, technicians, administrators, and playwrights, and develop the skills to pursue work in professional theatre and graduate school or apply skills to a variety of professions both inside and outside the theatre. The study of theatre at Kean is enhanced by a partnership with Premiere Stages, an AEA company in residence, and close proximity to New York, allowing frequent guest artists.
