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The Empire Builders

Presented by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at Walnut Street Theatre - Studio 5

February 10-February 26, 2011

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Boris Vian was a French novelist, playwright, poet, jazz musician and critic, song-writer and singer (Le Déserteur, 1954). He was an anti- Existentialist, though closely linked with Sartre and Les Temps modernes and a member of the Collège de Pataphysique from 1952.

Vian wrote lively plays in an Absurdist vein, notably Les Bâtisseurs d'empire (The Empire Builders 1959), but his greatest literary achievement lies in his novels: Vercoquin et le Plancton (written 1943-4, published 1947), L'Écume des jours (1947), a sentimental love-story with a disconcerting logic and beauty. Vian was also the author of four novels published under the pen-name Vernon Sullivan, including J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946). Vian 's work is irreverent, iconoclastic, provocative; linguistically and lyrically inventive with a penchant for satire, Surrealist fantasy, and a refined sense of logical absurdity.

In Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz (The Empire Builders, 1959) a bourgeois family inhabits a new apartment invaded by a terrifying noise.
 

The play was first staged in England in 1962 and New York in 1968.