Barbara Kraft recently spoke about the Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco, one of the foremost figures of the French avante-garde theater. Ionesco helped to inaugurate what came to be known as “theater of the absurd,” and considered Shakespeare to be the king of the “theatre of the absurd.” Here is her entire talk:
Barbara Kraft is the author of Light between the Shadows: a Conversation with Eugene Ionesco (2013), Henry Miller: The Last Days (2016), and Anais Nin: The Last Days (2012).
Photo of Eugene Ionesco via Wikipedia.
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Barbara Kraft is the author of Anais Nin: The Last Days (2013) and The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini: The latter was published in 1976 with a preface by Anaïs Nin, and laudatory comment by the late Carlos Baker, definitive biographer of Ernest Hemingway and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton. Kraft has also written several radio plays including a play on the legendary muse of William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne. The play won an Ohio State Award as “an outstanding example of original radio drama as written and directed by KPFK’s Barbara Kraft.” Kraft has written several libretti including The Dream Tunnel: A Musical Journey through America, commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra (with Kraft as narrator) for the 1976 Bicentennial. The Los Angeles Times wrote of her libretto for The Innocents: The Witch Trial at Salem “….Barbara Kraft gives vivid, incantatory fragments to vocal quartets of Magistrates, Clergy, two groups of Innocents and a chorus representing the Populace. Sections of raucous, conflicting (but tightly written) cries portrayed a community beset by hysteria.” A former reporter for Time, and contributor to Washington Post, People, USA Today, and Architectural Digest, Kraft’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review and Columbia Magazine, et al; and among the many radio programs she has hosted and produced is Transforming OC, a two-part documentary for KCRW (the award winning Santa Monica-based NPR station) on the 2006 opening of the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. Kraft is a Registered Reader at the Huntington Library in San Marino and lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.