Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.
All theatre is absurd.
We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.
My interest in theater really began in the '70s when American realism wasn't really in favor. I really dreaded going into a play that had a toaster that worked. I just didn't want to see that.
My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.
Most Americans would agree that Plowshares is a Theatre of the Absurd.
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.
I saw Waiting for Godot when I was 17 in rep with a then unknown actor called Peter O'Toole playing Vladimir. I remember leaving the theatre promising myself that one day I would have a go at this play and then pretty much forgot it for 50 years.
When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
