Editing Tristan Tzara (section)

===Plays of the 1920s===
Tristan Tzara's first play, ''[[The Gas Heart]]'', dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow.<ref name="ebra25">Brater, p.25</ref> They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech.<ref name="ebra25"/> The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist [[Alfred Jarry]]. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words.<ref name="ebra26">Brater, p.26</ref> Brater describes ''The Gas Heart'' as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".<ref name="ebra26"/>

In his 1924 play ''[[Handkerchief of Clouds]]'', Tzara explores the relation between perception, the [[subconscious]] and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a [[love triangle]] (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from ''[[Hamlet]]''.<ref>Beitchman, p.31-32</ref> Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: ''Handkerchief of Clouds'' requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names,<ref>Beitchman, p.32-34; Cernat, p.279</ref> and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the [[protagonist]], who in the end dies, is not assigned any name.<ref>Beitchman, p.32-34</ref> Writing for ''Integral'', Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events."<ref>Cernat, p.279</ref> Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on [[Marxism]], poet and banker are interchangeable [[Capitalism|capitalists]] who invest in different fields.<ref>Beitchman, p.34-35</ref> Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by [[Jean Cocteau]], who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "''Handkerchief of Clouds'' was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater."<ref>Răileanu & Carassou, p.34</ref> The work was nonetheless praised by [[Ion Călugăru]] at ''Integral'', who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.<ref name="pcern277"/>