mr. optometrist

Stanley Nelson likes to test the boundaries of Theatre of the Absurd and its associations with the surreal. It sometimes seems Laurel and Hardy have wandered onto an Ionesco landscape. In Mr. Optometrist, a woman on her lunch hour simply wants to have a loose screw on her eyeglasses tightened. The Optometrist is pompous, arrogant, seductive, bullying, manipulative. He quickly draws her into an unsettling phantasmagorical scenario of the cold war, local politics, oedipal references and impending menace. She resists and, at the same time, is irresistibly complicit. The Lady herself, who begins as a picture of innocence, become coquettish, flummoxed, menacing, always under a guise of naiveté. Both seem to have a screw loose, and even the little screw becomes a sexual innuendo. An ever-present aura of camp, so pervasive to theatre of the sixties, provides a fluffy cushion for the mayhem.