The Romanian-born Eug Ionesco, b. Nov. 26, 1912 [d. 1994], is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd. Ionesco came to playwriting almost by chance. Having decided to learn English, he was struck by the emptiness of the cliches of daily conversation that appeared in his phrase book. Out of such nonsensical sentences he constructed his first play, The Bald Soprano (1950; Eng. trans., 1958), which satirizes the deadliness and idiocy of the daily life of a bourgeois society frozen in meaningless formalities. Greatly surprised by the success of the play, Ionesco embarked on a career as a writer of what he called antiplays, which characteristically combine a dream or nightmare atmosphere with grotesque, bizarre, and whimsical humor. In his work the tragic and farcical are fused. In The Lesson (1951; Eng. trans., 1958), a teacher gains domination over his pupil through his superior use of language and finally kills her. In The Chairs (1952; Eng. trans., 1958), an old couple attempt to pass on their total life experience to humanity by inviting to a gathering a vast crowd of guests who never arrive but whose nonpresence is symbolized by a proliferation of empty chairs. Having convinced themselves that the crowd is assembled, the old people kill themselves, leaving the revelation of their message to an orator they have engaged who, as an added irony, turns out to be a feebleminded deaf-mute.