We think we know each other from somewhere.

In the words spoken without meaning (or in those meant but left unspoken).

In suffocatingly full sentences.

In crumpled silences.

In the “yes” that escapes the mouth, agreeing pointlessly to what we lack the courage to refuse.

In conversations about how well we are, about the unpredictable weather, and about “setting up” the eternally irregular.

The obvious has been said. The question is what we will do with our overlooked important matters.

“In a typical English drawing room,” the Youke theater group introduces itself to the audience with *Error 404*, based on Eugène Ionesco’s *The Bald Soprano*.

Ionesco wrote *The Bald Soprano* to learn the English language.

Based on a standardized teaching manual, it parodies and critiques the didacticism of theater, composing the tragedy of language and human communication. His characters are puppets revealing the deadening of humans under society’s materialistic ideologies. The bourgeois couples Smith and Martin live in a non-human world with predetermined behaviors, ready for sterile reproduction. Ionesco’s intensely philosophical anti-play, written in 1949, mourns the destruction of individuality in an era of relentless influx of regurgitated and prepackaged ideas and behaviors. Time is absent. Alienation reigns.

…

In the end — do we really know each other from somewhere?