DC Metro Arts

2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs’ at Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium

by Deb Miller

September 9, 2016

 

Emptiness. Isolation. Boredom. Expectation. Emptiness. The Old Man and Old Woman over-react to the petty nuisance of mosquitoes flying around them, then yammer incessant inanities to fill up the void of their existence and to stave off their loneliness while they wait.

 

Their nonsensical dialogue becomes increasingly frenetic as they prepare for the arrival of invited intellectuals and dignitaries to their lighthouse, frantically moving chair after chair into the room until we see double, bumping into the furniture and each other, engaging in petty conversations and overwrought interactions with their imagined guests in the empty chairs, gesticulating wildly and echoing one another’s fatuous banter and proclamations, building to a fevered crescendo in anticipation of the arrival of The Orator hired by the Old Man to deliver his message to the non-existent crowd so they can honor their suicide pact and leave the world simultaneously by jumping out their windows into the dark waters that surround them, assured that their moldering bodies will be together–though not right next to each other–through eternity, and believing that the Old Man’s revelation will be heard by all. He comes. They do. But is it?

 

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s razor-sharp production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs presents a wildly sardonic view of life’s futility in hysterically funny, deeply disquieting, award-worthy performances by company Co-Founders Bob Schmidt and Tina Brock as the protagonists, and long-time IRC member Tomas Dura as The Orator. Under Brock’s expert direction, every intonation, facial expression, gesture, and pose is spot-on and flawlessly delivered with a perfectly constructed rhythm, high-decibel urgency, and rapid-fire pace that makes the thoroughly engaging 75-minute performance fly by, as quickly as life.

 

Lisi Stoessel’s set and Erica Hoelscher’s costumes and wigs create a ridiculously bright, frilly, formal surface that contrasts with the underlying bleakness of the theme. Lighting by Robin Stamey accentuates the shifting emotional tone and the ultimate darkness we all face, and Brock’s sound design punctuates the proceedings with the noise of buzzing insects, the ringing of doorbells, and the incongruously cheerful strains of Johann Strauss’s popular waltz “By the Beautiful Blue Danube.”

 

As promised, Brock and her IRC team “bring good nothingness to life” as they tackle Ionesco’s message head-on, with full-throttle force and an unmatched comprehension of the absurd that will make you laugh till you cry, then haunt you long after you leave the theater. But please exit this trenchant production of The Chairs by way of the door, not through the window.

 

Running Time: Approximately 75 minutes, without intermission.

 

Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs plays through Sunday, September 25, 2016, performing at Walnut Street Theatre: Studio 5 – 825 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. For tickets, call (215) 413-1318, or purchase them online.

 

READ REVIEW ON DCMETROTHEATERARTS.COM

 

Broad Street Review   

Philly Fringe 2016 review: Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s ‘The Chairs’

Stand up for Ionesco's 'The Chairs'

by Mark Cofta

September 11, 2016

 

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC) is one of several companies that have grown through the annual Philly Fringe. The rise of artistic director Tina Brock's troupe devoted to works of Theatre of the Absurd (or "Theater of Derision," as IRC favorite playwright Eugene Ionesco preferred) has been a joy to see. One of their highlights was their 2009 Fringe hit, Ionesco's The Chairs.

 

Seven years later, IRC has remounted The Chairs, and it's even better.

 

Artistic maturity

That 2009 production felt stuffed into the irregular shape of the now-gone Society Hill Playhouse's Red Room. Lisi Stoessel's simple yet inventive set, with its seven doorways, Eiffel Tower chandelier, and dozens of unmatched chairs, is a more tidy fit in the intimate Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, one of IRC's two home bases (the other is L'Etage Cabaret). And there's no downstage center post to work around.

 

More importantly, Brock — director and star of both productions — has matured artistically, and her performance in The Chairs is truly sublime. Her Old Woman — dressed (by Erica Hoelscher) in a haphazard, yellowed wedding dress, white shoes, red stockings, and white wig — is a bent-over, shuffling dynamo, conjuring fantasies with her husband (Bob Schmidt), busily setting up chairs for a huge audience coming to hear him speak in their strange deserted lighthouse. Her voice, expressions, posture, and movement are inspiredly loony and endearing, and reveal complete commitment to the role, even when she's tripping over her dress or a folding chair refuses to open.

 

Seven years ago, I considered her performance great, so my expectations were high; and yet, this one is a revelation. Never mind that she also directed (generally considered a risky idea for actors), designed the inventive soundscape, and runs the company. She makes a difficult role, one that's easily buried in clichés of agedness and broad absurdist strokes, and shares a genuinely funny, warm, heartbreakingly tragic character.

 

Schmidt's performance is similarly sincere and comically quirky. Credit Brock and their long partnership for ensuring that her performance meshes with, and doesn't overwhelm, his. The Orator, played by Thomas Dura, is a fascinating enigma. Robin Stamey's lighting provides inventive shadows and colors.

 

Ionesco insight

IRC again makes an Ionesco play — they've produced several of his one acts plus Victims of Duty, The Lessen, Rhinoceros, and last year's Fringe hit Exit the King — somewhat understandable, though one must engage it with an open mind and suspend expectations of a coherent plot and familiar character development. The key to their Ionesco success, I think, is a willingness to have fun and share the humor without denigrating or ignoring the play's serious aspects, and avoiding the error of stiff reverence for scripts dear to theater academics.

 

IRC's The Chairs reveals a couple dependent upon their shared imaginations, and an opportunity — "My husband has never been understood but at last, his hour has come" — that's both shaped from thin air and very real. It's an 80-minute delight, starting with the fun treats placed on each audience seat before the show, and much, much more.

 

READ REVIEW ON BROADSTREETREVIEW.COM

 

Phindie.com

Independent coverage of Philadelphia theater and arts

THE CHAIRS (Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium):

2016 Fringe review 8

by Lev Feigin

September 11, 2016

 

IRC presents a must-see revival of Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 classic THE CHAIRS, a defining work of the theater of the absurd. The play teeters on the edge of a metaphysical abyss, hovering between presence and absence, sight and invisibility, sound and silence, being and non-being. It is a grim travesty where nothingness is not only the main theme but a dramatic persona.

 

An Old Woman (Tina Brock) and an Old Man (Bob Schmidt), live on an island, with “water under the windows, stretching as far as the horizon”.  (A superb minimalist stage design sees mist hovering over the set: a circular wall of a lighthouse with many doors and flowing gauze draperies on the ceiling from which hangs a vintage bulb.) Married for 75 years, the couple grouse, argue, make up, reminisce, and play games as they wait for guests to arrive by boats: the guests are invisible but we can intuit their presence through the couple’s interactions. Tonight is the big night. The Old Man has invited society’s crème de la crème to hear his message to the world, a revelation that will save humanity after it is delivered by an Orator (Tomas Dura) who is to speak on Old Man’s behalf. But we are in Ionesco’s universe, where meaning is always resisted and challenged. Words pile up faster than chairs; cognitive dissonance reigns over the stage as language games fracture in a world where Paris “never existed” or perhaps “it must have existed because it collapsed…Nothing remains of it but a song.”  It is nothing that eats away at the old couple, at their jittery, half-demented recollections, at their fleeting and jumbled longings in a place that’s half-madhouse, half-circus—rendered under Brock’s direction less in the grim key of tragedy, but an octave higher, as farce.

 

[Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street] September 6 –25, 2016; fringearts.com/eugene-ionesco-chairs.

 

READ THE REVIEW ON PHINDIE.COM

 

Phindie.com

Independent coverage of Philadelphia theater and arts“Casting call” for the chairs in Ionesco’s THE CHAIRS: Interview with IRC artistic director Tina Brock

by Henrik Eger

September 11, 2016

 

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium brings Eugene Ionesco’s hilarious, controversial, absurdist classic THE CHAIRS to the 2016 Fringe Festival. We talk to director Tina Brock about the show.

 

Henrik Eger: What draws you to Ionesco in general and to his CHAIRS in particular?

 

Tina Brock: It’s great fun to direct and perform his work, as he is asking for total commitment to the emotional choice, pushed to paroxysm. He takes situations to the extreme to illustrate a point. His sense of comedy and tragedy in grappling with the existential dilemma is wonderfully balanced. Ionesco finds hilarity in human foibles, the games we play to bring meaning to our short time on this earth and our tendency to defend our day-to-day decisions with great ferocity. Dismantling the ego can be hilarious—a recurring theme in Ionesco’s work.

 

Eger: Ionesco’s masterpiece premiered in Paris in 1952, where it saw more productions in the years to come. The English-speaking world did not take to his work enthusiastically until decades later. What do you think accounts for that initial resistance?

 

Brock: Participation in an Ionesco event is more like a sport. There is great stimulation, so much coming at you—sound, lights, emotion, language. It requires letting the experience hit you without trying to analyze each moment, which can be frustrating. At the same time, in a small venue, The Chairs is akin to watching a World Wide Wresting match. Ionesco doesn’t write the well-made play with a tidy ending and characters that immediately make sense to us. There is work involved in being an Ionesco audience member, which may be more than people want to sign up for when paying admission. For me, Ionesco serves it all up on a pretty nice platter. It’s active, emotional, funny, tragic—and all very relevant.

 

Eger: THE CHAIRS could be seen as an attempt to bring hope to a post-WWII society. Tell us about the things you did to convince the audience that the guests, symbols of life and survival, have arrived—even though we never see them.

 

Brock: Making each of the imaginary people real to us was useful. At times we had performers stand in so we could play the scenes with real people, and then imagine them in that position. When I was a kid, I’d line up all the dolls on the bed and deliver an overblown lecture about some meaningless thing I was interested in. It felt very much like those days.

 

Eger: I heard that IRC went so far that your designer actually had a casting call for the chairs. Is that true, or only a piece of surreal theater rumor?

 

Brock: Yes, it’s true. Set designer Lisi Stoessel actually had a casting call for the chairs in the show. We selected the ones that conjured types of people, and then attached an imaginary person to the chair. Since the audience members only see the chairs on stage, it’s important they leave an indelible mark—that they become the people. Ionesco wrote that the proliferation of objects was a powerful theatrical tool. This concept works to maximum effect in THE CHAIRS.

 

Eger: Ionesco introduces a living orator on stage, but, unbeknownst to the audience, makes him deaf and mute. How did you handle this complex situation?

 

Brock: It’s important that the Orator understands what he is trying to say and communicate that with all his will. He doesn’t anticipate that he will not be understood, so Tomas Dura must play the importance of delivering the Old Man’s message with as much clarity and stakes as he can.

 

Eger: What do you see as the overall theme in Ionesco’s plays, and in THE CHAIRS in particular?

 

Brock: Ionesco’s ongoing theme in his works—about how language, both written and spoken, can be a faulty tool for communicating real meaning—is evidenced in this play in many ways. The meaning between two people in a conversation is largely shared through the emotional content in the conversation—the nonverbal responses and the tone of the conversation. Ironically, the emotional communication in the play is easier to latch onto as a through line, since there is fairly universal understanding of what those emotions are.

 

Eger: Tell us more about the use of emotion versus the analytical in this play?

 

Brock: As long as we are clear in our delivery, the audience will be able to follow what we are feeling about the moments—one reason you can see this play performed in any language and understand what is transpiring. These characters don’t spend a lot of time analyzing their thoughts or situations—they simply feel a certain way and they act on that feeling. Ionesco uses some fun examples in THE CHAIRS of the potential banality of cocktail party conversations, the breaking down of communication, which seems particularly appropriate in this time.

 

Eger: Sexuality is no longer as big a taboo in the US as death and suicide, especially in a society that constantly pushes permanent “improvement and growth”—not allowing anyone to leave this life of their own volition, including aging couples in their suicide attempts. How do you interpret this complex situation in THE CHAIRS?

 

Brock: There is a lovely story in the play of the woman convincing the man that his message is important, and that “he has no right to keep his message from the universe.” I love this aspect of the play—that we have a duty to use our talents, to share them with the world, to teach others, and to live as a clean burning engine if you will—that we have gifts that want to be revealed to the world, and that it’s our own egos getting in the way of stopping ourselves from following the path.

 

Eger: Could you give an example?

 

Brock: Sure. It’s a hilarious turn that once the Old Man decides he will share his message that he then doesn’t have the confidence to tell his own story and hires a surrogate. The Old Woman then becomes very afraid of the thing she set into motion—that what she wished for complicated their very simple humble existence.

 

The old couple reach this conclusion in the play—that their stories have been told, that they have achieved their goals, and that they can now depart in good conscience. What’s disturbing is that Ionesco entrusted this important message to a character who wasn’t able to articulate it well.

 

Eger: Ionesco wrote how all-important the ending of his play was, even though it’s the exact opposite of a tangible conclusion, when he wrote, “The last decisive moment of the play should be the expression of . . . absence.”

 

Brock: Ionesco gives clear instruction on the final sound cue, aided in large part by a set filled with empty chairs and haze—breeze blowing. 

 

Eger: Could you share some hilarious moments with us that occurred during your rehearsals?

 

Brock: Hardly hilarious, but appropriately ridiculous. I developed shingles early in rehearsal. Imagine trying to cart around 50 chairs on stage in two and a half minutes with crazy nerve-ending pain. It’s not a situation that clears itself quickly. We’re laughing now, though it wasn’t too funny at the time.

 

And every night there’s the show going on backstage—a very small space, which stores all the chairs: our chair wrangler, Sam Eli, and the Orator, Tomas Dura, and I, all tripping over one another to get every single chair on stage in a very short time. A classic Three Stooges Routine every night. Seriously, we are going to tape it, it’s so ridiculous.

 

Eger: What have you planned for IRC, Philadelphia’s surreal theater, for the 2016 fall and winter season?

 

Brock: David Ives’ Lives of the Saints at L’Etage in November, and Jean Giraudoux’s The Enchanted at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5 in February 2017.

 

Eger: Is there anything else you would like to share?

 

Brock: It’s frustrating that Ionesco gets characterized as “silly” by some people. His dramas are anything but—particularly in this day and age. Thank you for your thoughtful interview—you’re a toughie. I appreciate your probing questions as THE CHAIRS is not only a hilarious, but a thought-provoking play.

 

Eger: Tina, the real toughie is the artistic director with shingles who, after auditioning chairs as if they were actors, then, with the help of cast members, schlepped around all 50 chairs—in rehearsal after rehearsal. 

 

[Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street] September 6 –25, 2016; fringearts.com/eugene-ionesco-chairs.

 

READ THE REVIEW ON PHINDIE.COM

 

DC Metro Arts

2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Interview: ‘Revisiting Current Remounts of Past Hits with Terry Brennan, Tina Brock, and Greg Kennedy

by Deb Miller

September 14, 2016

 

Three annual Fringe favorites have chosen to remount a past hit for this year’s festival, giving audiences a chance to see the acclaimed works they missed, or to revisit the shows they loved. I had the opportunity to discuss the new 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival productions of Spheruswith Innovative Juggler Greg Kennedy, Antihero with Tribe of Fools’ Terry Brennan, and Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs with Tina Brock from the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, to get their insights into the popular productions and their specific reasons for presenting them again.

 

DEB: Why did you decide to remount a past work for this year’s Fringe? .

 

TERRY: I think we have a very good reason: the world feels a lot more violent now than it did in 2013, when we premiered Antihero. At the time when we first decided to remount it, during the primary elections, Trump wasn’t really a motivation for doing it. But since then, the language of violence and bigotry has become so rampant in mainstream culture and politics; it’s almost doubled, or tripled.  I see that kind of escalation in so many more places now than ever before, so we wanted to make that point again with the show.

 

TINA: In 2009, The Chairs was the IRC’s first production in a venue outside of L’Etage Cabaret, where we began in 2007. We only did seven shows at Society Hill Playhouse, and the run sold out within a very short time of its opening. This year the IRC marks its tenth anniversary, and it seemed appropriate to celebrate with a remount of a show many people still point to as one of their favorites. The themes in the play, while always timely, seemed particularly so this year; it’s hard to listen to the news and not feel some sense of Ionesco’s focus on the lack of communication and the inability of language to express certain states of being and ideas.

 

GREG: I wrote Spherus four or five years before I left to tour with Cirque du Soleil; it was designed to be glowing with light. But now technology has improved, so I felt it was time for an update. I sat down with my assistants and used some of the 3D mapping that had since been developed, to create a set that would match each scene. We now have very specific lighting from video projections that complement and interact with the performance. For example, in one scene we have white cardboard boxes, and with the new software, we can do three projections at once, in tandem. Other projections include the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and willow trees blowing in the wind, which give the show a very organic feel. Every year, around February, I start thinking about the Fringe and what to do, so with the new tools that are available, I felt that this was a good time to bring back Spherus.

 

What about the show is indicative of your signature style? 

 

TERRY: Antihero is filled with heightened physicality, and at Tribe of Fools over the past five years, we’ve focused on how to tell a story through movement and gesture, with parkour, acrobatics, and stunts. This production is the most acrobatic-heavy of all the shows we’ve done, with twists, jumps, and flying through the air! We have stylized fight scenes: some of the gestures are threatening, and some are not; some of the fights are real confrontations between the characters, and some take place only in their minds. The tone is almost like an action movie or a video game. We poke fun at the casualness of the violence, while making a relevant statement about the brutality we all see on a regular basis.

 

TINA: All the elements of an absurdist IRC production are consistent with and present in The Chairs! There is the humor, which is absolutely necessary in everything; its absence would be the downfall of the show, of one that does not resonate. There is clarity in the language, in making sense out of what, to many, seems like nonsensical dialogue. Some of the language is an attempt to show the disintegration of language and the banality of our conversations, and some sections use language as an emotional barometer. Instead of moaning, or screaming, or crying, the action is the use of language in a different form, to exchange emotional content. The characters are loud, they are overwrought, they are acting– this is what must be present to create the ridiculous world of the play. The design, too—thoughtfully executed by Lisi Stoessel, Erica Hoelscher, and Robin Stamey—are greatly accentuated to heighten the point and the experience. We are grounded in reality and then pushed that extra length, not to be silly, not to be broad, not for the sake of trying to be funny, but to bring out the underlying sadness and deep ennui that drives the reason for the play, and for absurdist theater in general, to which IRC is dedicated. Without setting those elements correctly, the audience is led to believe that they are experiencing psychological realism. This play is not that, and Theater of the Absurd is not that, and IRC is not that!

 

GREG: Spherus presents a very modern form of juggling based on engineering.  I used to be an engineer (I took five months off from my job in the 1990s, and never went back!), but I took the knowledge from my background to create a blend of science with art. The show includes structural geometric shapes, including two dancers– Rachel Lancaster and Christine Morano—manipulating a giant helix in space, with beautiful light and changing colors. I use engineering and the latest technology to highlight the performances more in all of my shows, and specifically for this one, the advanced 3D video mapping software and projections.

 

What’s your favorite memory from your previous production?

 

TERRY: In the second–to-last scene–the last big group scene–the character of a twelve-year-old boy who got kicked out of the comic book store comes back and tells everyone that he found the ultimate superhero of the universe, Aquaman. Tim Popp improvised, and it was a genius moment! I wrote it down on the spot; I wanted to transcribe the full monologue, so he could do it the same way every time. And I included it again in this current production.

 

TINA: Performing in Society Hill Playhouse was a favorite! The walls were filled with framed posters from many Ionesco and Beckett productions from the late 1950s and ‘60s. It was wonderful to think about what those productions might have been like, and how audiences would have reacted. You could feel the history in the building and on the stage.  I also remember how students really connected with the story, regardless of its characters being many generations older than they were. There is an accessible universal story here and a way in for all ages.

 

GREG: All sorts of funny things happened during rehearsals. We do one piece in the show with a tangle of gymnastic ribbons on wands. When we were first getting used to the routine, we kept getting tied up in them, which was especially funny because it was supposed to be a gentle graceful piece!

 

Have you made any changes in your show this time around?

 

TERRY: We made a few. We were very happy with the 2013 show, but we wanted to update it, and to fix some things from the first production. I did some retooling of the opening fight scene, and the second half of the show seemed a little slow-paced, so I reordered some of the scenes and cut some to make it move faster. I also added more material for Colleen Hughes’s character Jennifer Walters—a feminist PhD student researching the impact of popular fiction on our moral viewpoints–to do her more justice.

 

TINA: The Old Woman’s costume is a little grander, though the Orator’s is still the same. At this time, seven years since we first performed the show, we are in a more tragic place it seems. And yet to me this play is tame compared to recent tragic events in our world. To address that difference, the play needed to be pushed out there just a bit more, and the elements needed to be a bit stronger. The ceiling at Society Hill Playhouse was much higher, so some of the emotion could float into the rafters. Here in Walnut Street Theatre’s Studio 5, the play reads as much more claustrophobic, much more desperate, and I think that reflects where we are today.

 

GREG: With the new 3D mapping tech, we have images changing with the music throughout the show. We also worked in some new routines, as well as revamping and updating the old ones.

 

What makes this show especially appropriate for the Fringe?

 

TERRY: Even though Antihero has elements of a standard play, with a storyline and characters, there’s also a lot of physicality. Many of our stunts are stylized; they’re big and over the top. I think the biggest thing is the police tap dance. Where else can you see that?!

 

TINA: After watching the conventions this summer, it was hard not to see on stage the old Punch and Judy puppet shows that Ionesco was so fond of, and that he indicated must be present in tone to create the world of the play. They influenced his writing and his desire to present a different form of theater, beyond the boulevard theater that was so popular at the time. His work has been ‘fringe’ since its very inception, so this show fits the festival perfectly!

 

GREG: Fringe is about growth and taking chances. That’s why I do it every year.

 

Thank you, Terry, Tina, and Greg, for sharing your views on these favorite shows. I hope audiences who missed them last time around will catch them this time, and those who enjoyed them before will go again to see the updated versions!

 

READ REVIEW ON DCMETROTHEATERARTS.COM

 

NealsPaper.com

The Chairs — Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, Walnut 5

by Neal Zoren

September 15, 2016

 

The point is Brock knows what she’s doing. She has a full, clear understanding of the text, and she knows how to put it on a stage while balancing the comedy, pathos, and even tragedy inherent in Ionesco’s works. Brock can make the rhinoceros roar with threatening purpose, show the way a kingdom crumbles from the point of view of one who thinks he’s too crucial to die — too powerful to fail? — and make it poignant when two people are so satisfied they know all there is to know and lived as well as anyone could live, they commit simultaneous suicide out of sheer and blissful contentment there’s no more to explore and nothing new to enjoy.

 

Brock’s current production of “The Chairs,” part of both the Fringe Arts Festival and a regular Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium run, is a truly grand achievement — funny, entertaining, stylish, and piercing at once.

 

Let’s start with Ionesco’s language, which in uncomprehending or slapdash hands could favor the non-sequitur or seem like random blather (as one part of “The Chair” must, and delightfully so).

 

Brock knows how a pace it, knows how the make the utterances of two primary characters, Old Woman and Old Man, an ongoing aria that makes sense as a way people, especially a couple that’s been married for 77 years, might communicate with each other. Rather than having Ionesco’s words sound disjointed or seem like a collection of gibberish, Brock and Bob Schmidt, who play the woman and man, turn into the random, but plausible, chatter of two people who have lived together for a long time and who fill their hours making idle comments and observations, only something coalescing phrases into conversation or creating a real volley of dialogue/ Communication between Brock’s and Schmidt’s characters have a familiar pace and pitch to it. It is the banter of people involved in a task or just passing time.

 

Yet it’s telling. In a way Ionesco and Brock bring to the fore. The couple’s main theme is happiness and how proud they are that some revelation of the Old Man’s is considered so vital to the well-being and continuation of mankind, dwindled, the text implies, by some global catastrophe prior to the time of the play, another flood perhaps considering the couple lives adjacent to the sea on all sides of their domicile, that a special ceremony has been convened at the couple’s home so it can be pronounced to the immediate world en masse. All in the vicinity and beyond have been invited. The man gets tongue-tied speaking in public, so an orator, deftly played by Tomas Dura in classic raiment designed by Erica Hoelscher, is hired to deliver his sage salvo. The emperor the land the couple inhabit comes to hear the life-defining words. Other dignitaries mix with commoners as the crowd gathers to hear the Old Man’s affirming secret, and the couple scrambles to scrounge every chair their seaside house holds to accommodate the constantly swelling horde of visitors.

 

The greeting of guests and gathering and placing of chairs provides diversion and physical business. Ionesco is up to much more, and Brock is keen at displaying it.

 

More importantly, within the traded comments of the ancient husband and wife, you hear things that make you doubt either of them could stumble upon the formula for perfection. All of the vicissitudes of life come out in the various maunderings of the focal couple. You hear enthusiastic praise, but you also hear hurtful and lasting recriminations.

 

This man and woman have had a full life, and that includes trouble, suspicions, gossip, marital acrimony, marital contentment, children going off to make their own lives, accolades deserved and not, slights and oversights deserved or not. Ionesco shows people creeping through life experiencing all most people do, perhaps with a larger scooch of elegance expected from a man who is hinted to be a scholar and a pair that is known to and hobnobs with potentates.

 

A life is all of its tediousness and glory is what Ionesco presents. Brock, Schmidt, and Dura make it all entertaining to see unfold and accessible. Brock opens the gate to let you savor and admire Ionesco’s cunning and clarity. She and her cohorts, in their wonderful, spot-on line readings, physical business, and range of attitudes and emotions. Illuminate the futility even a life of recognized accomplishment can be, the joy such a life brings futile or not, mainly because futility doesn’t enter many people’s minds, — You have to be Ionesco or Tolstoy to express Weltschmertz so deeply and comprehensively, Ionesco doing it with a glint in his eye. — and the illusion of value a gathering awaiting your apotheosis of a pronouncement, with the emperor among those attending, might bring.

 

Ionesco, in his shrewd and winsome way, forces you to consider what life might be about, whether the Old Man is the one who can tell you or not. Brock makes the journey delightful but her smart, perceptive way of bringing Ionesco to the stage. Her Eugène Ionesco is categorized as an absurdist. The dialogue in his plays often reads as non-sequitur. His characters can rampage, pose, cower, or make declarations at unexpected times. Fantastic events or pronouncements, using the most literal meaning of fantastic, might occur. An Ionescoan world is topsy-turvy, at the mercy of extremes, hidden from many of the denizens of it, eccentric, and offbeat.

 

Yet the virtue of Ionesco is the clarity by which we, his audience, realize truths of the world within his metaphors, anomalies, inversions, and juxtapositions of quiet and commotion.

 

Philadelphia has been lucky in recent years. All four staple plays in Ionesco’s oeuvre have been seen within the last two years, “The Bald Soprano” in a tame but effective production by Curio Theatre, “Rhinoceros,” “Exit the King,” and now “The Chairs” in illuminating stagings by a woman who obviously knows what makes Ionesco tick, Tina Brock.

 

I mentioned the virtue of Ionesco. The virtue of Brock is while she maintains a great playwright’s skewed vision of a skewed world, a world in which people rattle on and knock about believing they’re making sense and tending to the important when they’re really engaging in the vaulted expression of the mundane, a world in which obvious threats have to take monstrous form before anyone takes notice or action, a world in which paranoia, overweening pride, and some notion that we can defeat mortality, she finds the logic and the means to bring forth Ionesco’s clarity and display his genius.

 

Which is coupled with her own.

 

Brock enjoys dressing her characters in the outlandish and putting them in settings that are more fanciful than realistic. She enjoys the movement and the use of comic voices Ionesco’s work affords. Her productions, “Rhinoceros” and “Exit the King” more than the more straightforward and pseudo-realistic “The Chairs,” are stylized but in a way that elicits admiration for Brock’s cleverness rather than wonder at her type of theatricality.

 

production of “The Chairs” is enthrallingly entertaining from start to finish. Through the comedy and images of banality, Ionesco gets to display his profundity, which seems when you sort all out as carefully as Brock did, in great supply and worth noting. Absurdity is the way to go to find lucidity.

 

Bravo to Brock and the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy cast, designers, and crew. The give and take between Brock and Schmidt in their roles is extraordinary. Words and their delivery make this production, and Brock and Schmidt are masters in making each phrase, its tone, and its timing count. Diction is as perfect as the expression with which a line is said.

 

Wigs and makeup, especially the wigs, add to the feel of Brock’s production. Schmidt wears a shock of neatly parted white hair that, once you know he’s a scholar and philosopher, makes you think of Bertrand Russell or Thomas Edison with his hair thicker. Brock’s Old Woman looks like a cross between Miss Havisham in bridal garb and a duenna in gauzy clothing. Her wig is long and stark white. She wears a diaphonous pale pink gown with hot pink trim on its edges and a sheer veil-like head covering. Brock and Schmidt seem like an old couple that dress from dinner but in clothes a decade or two out of date in style and formality, clothes that suit a scholar and woman who seems to have known wealth throughout her life. Dura’s costume, straight out of a Louis XIV vignette or Restoration play, is marvelous. It suggest the cavalier and the narcissistic, and Dura takes pleasure in posing in it and using it to suggest the pompousness and self-importance of The Orator.

 

Ionesco is not easy to bring to the stage, as worthy and as welcome as his plays are when they emerge. Brocks sees through absurdity to the more essential things Ionesco is saying, and saying so well. She, thank goodness, avoids daft for daft’s sake and finds Ionesco’s core while also skillfully mining his humor and giving her audience a good time.

 

“The Chairs,” produced by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, runs through Sunday, September 25, at Walnut 5, on the fifth floor of the Walnut Street Theatre, 9th and Walnut Streets, in Philadelphia. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets range from $25 to $22 and can be obtained by calling 215-285-0472 or by visiting www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.

 

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