THE STAGE: Oui, Non, Moi

The curtain went up last week at off-Broadway's Theater de Lys, and there on the stage—in a play called The Shepherd's Chameleon, by French Playwright Eugene Ionesco—was an actor playing a character called Ionesco, a playwright at work on a play called The Shepherd's Chameleon. Three more characters, each called Bartholomeus, turned up and began to unravel funny skeins of academic pedantry in argument with the playwright.

All this was no surprise to those who came expecting to be surprised, as any Ionesco audience must. It was a kind of Left Bank version of...