Perhaps the most convincing interpretation of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs is the theatrical one: It’s about the impossibility of a playwright making a statement to an audience. The empty chairs on stage, then, represent the audience — nonentities, imaginary figures, with no capacity to understand or to learn. The Old Man and Old Woman who greet these invisible guests represent the playwright as he marshals his confused, vain, laughably optimistic forces in preparation for his grand discourse. The Orator who comes to deliver the crucial speech — dressed, according to Ionesco, like a 19th-century painter or poet — represents the artist at the moment that his message is articulated. The fact that the Orator is deaf and dumb, that he can only make strange noises and write nonsense on a blackboard, represents the failure of Ionesco, or any modern playwright, to see beyond himself and transcend the barriers that separate one human from another.Is this interpretation nihilistic? Yes, but it fits what we know about Ionesco, a playwright obsessed with the void (“The theme of the play,” he said in a letter, “is nothingness”) and haunted by death (see his The Killer and Exit the King). Ionesco’s position may be debatable — after all, if he teaches us about emptiness, isn’t he still teaching, aren’t we understanding? — but it’s an inevitable product of modern self-doubt, and worthy of our time even if we’re sure we can refute it. As in so many of his plays, Ionesco in The Chairs asks us to work, to become code-breakers. If we’re not afraid to be intellectually challenged — if we don’t mind a degree of uncertainty, even bafflement — the experience can turn out to be abundantly rewarding.
We’re helped to that feeling by a Stageworks/Gorilla Theatre production that’s virtually perfect. As the Old Man and Old Woman who welcome one invisible guest after the next to their isolated island home, Richard Coppinger and Midge Mamatas couldn’t be more persuasive. These two really do seem to have been married for 75 years: Over time, she’s come to be as much mother as wife. Coppinger and Mamatas are gifted mimes when the script calls for it: With (apparent) great difficulty they make their way through a packed crowd of imaginary visitors, speak convincingly to phantoms, even flirt with non-beings. And as the Orator who comes, finally, to speak eloquently for the Old Man, Adam Belvo is superb. In the smock and beret designed by Anna Brennen and Liz Russell, he’s the very image of the Great Artist who sees more deeply than ordinary humans and whose every pronouncement is hugely important.
Brennen’s direction of the play is nothing short of brilliant. Her actors show an almost microscopic command of detail, a feat that’s all the more difficult when most of the onstage characters to whom they relate don’t really exist. Finally, R. T. Williams’ wonderful set — a backdrop of lopsided doors and windows and variously-sized triangles — could have been conceived by Picasso. If ever a set captured the spirit of a play, this is the one: absurdism in three shades of gray.
My interpretation is only one of the many possible, and you may see something altogether different. You may also, at times, be displeased with The Chairs — there are moments when one could wish for more variety of action. Still, after a thousand sitcoms and sitdrams, we need more Ionesco. We’ve had realism up to the gills; it’s time for a change of pace.
Which is precisely what this bizarre, tantalizing comedy provides.
American Hilarity
The Complete History of America (abridged) is one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in many months. This is satire at its best: pointed, silly, intellectual, moronic, almost scholarly in its scope and often politically incorrect. “This is better than Desperate Housewives,” said the woman sitting next to me, and she was surely correct: History is live theater as group celebration. If you care for a good laugh, or if you just want to see three actors giving everything they have, hurry over to the Shimberg Playhouse. I haven’t seen a better Jobsite Theater production since Cloud Nine (also directed, tellingly, by Katrina Stevenson). I haven’t laughed so loud since I saw The Producers.
Some favorite moments, as presented by actors David Jenkins, Jason Vaughan Evans and Shawn Paonessa: an argument between Amerigo Vespucci and his wife over his failings as a mapmaker; the demonstration that the word “American,” when rearranged, spells “I Can Ream”; the suggestion that Columbus’ slaughter and enslavement of native peoples made him “a true American”; the note that pre-Columbian history includes the birth of Bob Dole; Jenkins fashioning a ridiculously childish balloon animal to illustrate a Native American creation myth; a rap song about the colonization of the continent; Jenkins as a witch-hunting Salem pastor reminding us to “hunt the good hunt”; Jenkins and Evans as Minute Men who are truly minute (as in tiny); everyone getting high on “Monticello Gold”; the Bill of Wrongs; Evans and Paonessa as the comedy team Lewis and Clark; all three actors pretending to be slides in an errant projector; the name “Spiro Agnew” rearranged into “Grow A Penis”; the slur concerning Great American Women Trading Cards (“Collect all three”); and the confession: “I wanted to make love to her in the worst way: standing up in a hammock.” Add a Dr. Seuss hallucination, some nasty jabs at Ronald Reagan and a Boston cream pie, and you’ve got one delirious experience.
It only remains to note the authors: Adam Long, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor (with some additions by the Jobsite staff); the delightful red, white and blue costumes by director Stevenson; and the attractive set framed by a chronology of key American events and backed by a 12-starred American flag (which colony didn’t make it?). If you’ve seen the other Jobsite “abridged” shows — on the works of Shakespeare and the Bible — you needn’t worry about redundancy. This one enjoys an inspiration all its own.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
