"...the aesthetics of my plays - to simplify it somewhat - were based on a particular kind of foregrounding...i.e., on a viewpoint that removes the obfuscations of conventional perception from phenomena, tears them out of their habitual and automatic interpretational contexts and attempts to perceive them - as Ivan writes - "without glasses." Among other things, that means perceiving their absurdity as an insufficiently clear dimension of reality (because it is obscured by conventional interpretations). Ridding phenomena of false meaning. Manifesting them as absurd, and thus opening the question of their true meaning. The absurdity of entities as an invitation to inquire after the nature of being."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Not by any means the majority view of the writers of absurdist theater, but one I'm very sympathetic with. Absurdity is the experience of an absence. Meaning is what is absent. The hole suggests what once (and what might again) fill it.
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