Theater Review: Ionesco’s The Killer Is Confusing and Unskippable

Unable to get much attention amid pre-Tony hysteria and post-Tony exhaustion, some Off Broadway companies seem to take advantage of the blackout to dump inventory. Be warned: June is therefore littered, like May before it, with pointless, wayward, or cadaverous plays. How gratifying, then, to find the Theater for a New Audience doubling down on its serious mission with some unreconstructed midcentury Ionesco. And though The Killer remains perplexing and even a bit annoying after 55 years, it’s surely the season’s must-see, must-fail-to-understand theatrical event. Ionesco, you feel, would not have minded the shrugging: Bewilderment is both his style and his point. He dramatizes it here in the character of Berenger, a weather-beaten everyman who also appears in later Ionesco works like Rhinoceros and Exit the King. In The Killer, we meet him as he tours a new Paris neighborhood of perfect homes and permablue skies: a place, the architect tells him, where the roofs are waterproofed not because it rains but “as a matter of principle.”