Its author, a little-known millionaire named Raymond Roussel, had been encouraged by playwright Edmond Rostand-then wildly famous for dramatizing the life of Cyrano de Bergerac-to bring his work to the stage. Rather, it was a staging of a 1910 novel, Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa), that had recently been serialized in the conservative journal Le Gaulois du Dimanche, an organ associated with the monarchist upper echelons of Parisian society.
Surprisingly, this proto-Surrealist offering by the Théâtre Antoine was not the product of Duchamp’s own experimentalist circle. It had been advertised around Paris with a poster displaying twelve disconcerting scenes: an earthworm playing a zither, a thermomechanical orchestra powered by an imaginary substance named “bexium,” a rolling statue made of whalebone corset stays, and other fanciful technologies, works of art, animals, and often unfortunate human beings (who were apparently needled or electrified during rituals and performances, if the poster were to be believed). IN THE SPRING OF 1912, Marcel Duchamp went to see a very strange play.
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