mr. optometrist

by Stanley Nelson

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.

34 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2014

About the author

Stanley Nelson is senior staff writer for Chickasaw Press and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. He joined the Chickasaw Press staff in 2010, after spending thirty years as a manager, editor, and columnist for newspapers and other media-related enterprises in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arkansas. He is the author of Toli: Chickasaw Stickball Then and Now, which was released by Chickasaw Press in 2016. His work has appeared in The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture and Chokma: Chickasaw Magazine, and he has contributed text for a number of other Chickasaw Press titles. He studied journalism at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma, and the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Nelson lives in Ada, Oklahoma.