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...