SEARCHING FOR HOPE IN SAMUEL BECKETT, EDWARD ALBEE, AND SAM SHEPARD

Reading absurdist plays as hopeful is rare because they are filled with portrayals of horror and despair. However, the tragedy of these plays can allow the audience to experience an atypical kind of hope, often during the final moments of the play. Though the conclusions of the plays are usually ambiguous, this ambiguity and lack of resolutiondoes not preclude hope. The characters persist through their suffering and react in ways that can allow a hopeful affect on the audience. The three absurdist playwrights, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard, express differing views of the tragic nature of the human condition. However, persistent through all of their work is the ability to view tragedy as having a hopeful affect on the audience. Though the plays do not necessitate a reading of hopefulness, their plays do not preclude this. These absurdist plays do not force the audience into despair, but instead leave open the option of experiencing an expectation and determination for life.

[Alban Köhler (1874-1947): Inventor of grid therapy]

Grid (or sieve) therapy ("Gitter-" oder "Siebtherapie"), spatially fractionated kilo- and megavolt X-ray therapy, was invented in 1909 by Alban Köhler, a radiologist in Wiesbaden, Germany. He tested it on several patients before 1913 using approximately 60-70kV Hittorf-Crookes tubes. Köhler pushed the X-ray tube's lead-shielded housing against a stiff grid of 1 mm-square iron wires woven 3.0-3.5mm on center, taped tightly to the skin over a thin chamois. Numerous islets unshielded by iron in the pressure-blanched skin were irradiated with up to about 6 erythema doses (ED). The skin was then thoroughly cleansed, disinfected, and bandaged; delayed punctate necrosis healed in several weeks. Although grid therapy was disparaged or ignored until the 1930s, it has been used successfully since then to shrink bulky malignancies. Also, advanced cancers in rats and mice have been mitigated or ablated using Köhler's concept since the early 1990s by unidirectional or stereotactic exposure to an array of nearly parallel microplanar (25-75μm-wide) beams of very intense, moderately hard (median energy approximately 100 keV) synchrotron-generated X rays spaced 0.1-0.4mm on center. Such beams maintain sharp edges at high doses well beneath the skin yet confer little toxicity. They could palliate some otherwise intractable malignancies, perhaps in young children too, with tolerable sequelae. There are plans for such studies in larger animals.