Pangea has clear-eyed read on ‘Chairs’
Published 10/4/08
Pioneer Press
By Dominic P. Papatola
Plenty of smart people have spilled tens of thousands of words attempting to decode “The Chairs.” As for myself, the only thing I’m sure of is that a good production of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic needs to do what I’ve never really been able to do with the play: grab onto something and then hang on.
Pangea World Theater’s production succeeds in that not-insubstantial task, in an intimate production starring old Guthrie hands — and real-life husband and wife — Richard Ooms and Claudia Wilkens.
Ionesco’s plot is clear enough on the surface: A very elderly man and woman have lived for a long time in a house high above the sea, where they endlessly rehash old regrets and spin haphazardly forward toward the delivery of a Great Message that is the culmination of the old man’s work. Not confident in his ability to deliver the message with requisite force and clarity, the old man has hired an orator.
A great mass of invisible guests arrive — soldiers and beauties, parents with children, the media and finally the Emperor himself. The orator arrives, and the old couple, convinced that their life’s work has been completed, commit suicide by flinging themselves out the windows. The orator — played in this production with man-in-black cool by Alberto Panelli — opens his mouth to deliver the old man’s message, but he is a deaf-mute, and his utterings are incomprehensible.
What does it mean?
Search me, but under the intensely focused direction of Dipankar Mukherjee, Pangea’s production seems to lean toward the idea that this is the old woman’s story. From the moment Wilkens shuffles onto the stage, her mismatched shoes squeaking on the floor, she brings a sense of awareness and tolerance and clear-eyed keenness toward her relationship with the old man.
She gamely and good-naturedly endures his wild mood swings — from delusions of grandeur to infantile babbling — but in the moments when her husband’s attention is focused elsewhere, it’s easy to read on Wilkens’ face the exhaustion and frustration that’s come from decades of playing the same game and reciting the same words of comfort over and over again. There’s love in her eyes, but there’s also resignation.
Which is not at all to downplay Ooms’ contributions. Schlumpily dressed, with fishing lures hanging on his vest, he gives a sense of precision to this addled old man. Ooms doesn’t play him as mad, but rather as dissipated, as though he can no longer quite weave the strands of his life together.
When the old man announces that tonight is the night his message will be transmitted, the temperature in the room changes and it becomes clear that this night will be different from the thousands of nights that have preceded it. And, after a momentary panic, the old woman jumps right in, bringing on more chairs for the invisible guests, then flirting with them, berating them and hocking merchandise to them like Wally the Beerman.
Does this mean that the old woman has given in, that she’s decided to join her husband’s mania, to at last play the endgame? Maybe. The old man observes early in the play that, “The further one goes, the deeper one sinks.”
Or maybe not. This is a play as much about your perceptions as it is the playwright’s words. Pangea’s production doesn’t offer answers so much as it offers tools.
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