Born in 1909 in Slatina, Romania, Eugène Ionesco was taken to France as a baby and remained there until 1925. Then he returned to Romania and obtained a degree there before returning to France. He was caught in Marseille at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and stayed there until the end of the war in 1944. He then moved to Paris to get his doctorate and, eventually, to settle long term. Ionesco came to theater later in life, while learning to speak English. The banal sentences in the primer he studied from, spoken by the fictional characters Mr. and Mrs. Smith, struck him as so clichéd as to be entirely devoid of meaning. This experience inspired the play that would become The Bald...
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