Michael Brosilow
A man and a woman on a stage surrounded by empty chairs.
Is there anybody out there? James Ridge, left, and Colleen Madden in ‘The Chairs.’
American Players Theatre's production of The Chairs asks audiences to accept a simple premise: Trust these two people. For 90 minutes, an elderly couple welcomes guests who aren't there, prepares for an important speech that may never happen, and clings to a shared understanding of the world that often seems two steps removed from reality. Under Vanessa Stalling's direction, Eugène Ionesco's absurdist classic becomes less an exercise in absurdism than an exploration of the stories people tell themselves to make sense of lives that have not unfolded as expected.
As the couple, Colleen Madden and James Ridge earn that trust almost immediately. Before the audience fully encounters Ionesco's language, logic, or chaos, they establish the rules of the world we are about to enter. As the Old Woman and Old Man, they move through the production with remarkable precision, inviting us to accept a reality that becomes increasingly strange and increasingly compelling.
The Old Woman believes completely in the Old Man's vision of himself. He has a message for humanity, she insists, an important truth the world somehow never had the opportunity to hear. Whether life, circumstance, or his own shortcomings prevented that fulfillment hardly matters anymore. What matters is that she believes it.
When she tells him, "Your story is my story," she reveals the foundation of their relationship. She is not merely supporting his dream. She is helping create it. His disappointments have become hers. His ambitions have become hers. Together they have spent a lifetime constructing a narrative that gives shape and meaning to their existence.
What makes Madden and Ridge so effective is that they never play the absurdity for laughs. They play it with complete sincerity. About half of their conversations make perfect sense. The other half seem to arrive from somewhere else: thoughts begin, drift away, collide with other thoughts, and disappear. Logic comes and goes. Yet the emotional truth remains remarkably clear.
These are two people trying to make sense of their lives. Trying to convince themselves that their experiences mattered. Trying to believe there is still a purpose waiting just beyond the horizon.
The physical demands of the production are considerable, and you can’t help but wonder if this intensity can be sustained. Yet somehow the two actors do it — their physicality works in tandem, each movement reinforcing the other's. Ridge's commitment never wavers, no matter how strange the circumstances become, while Madden's stagecraft gives shape and structure to the increasingly chaotic world around them.
There is an extended sequence in which the Old Woman assumes the role of the Old Man's mother. It is one of the play's stranger passages and perhaps runs a bit long for contemporary tastes. But that is a function of Ionesco's script rather than this production. More importantly, the scene reveals yet another role the Old Woman is willing to assume in service of the man she loves: wife, caretaker, audience, champion, mother — whatever is required.
As the Old Man observes at one point, "The further we go, the deeper we sink."
The play builds deliberately, and patience may be necessary in its early stretches. The payoff, however, is worth it. The production truly comes alive once chaos arrives.
Invisible guests begin appearing. Conversations overlap. The stage fills with people who are never actually there. Most hilariously, the Old Woman races to accommodate an ever-growing crowd, carrying chair after chair onto the stage with increasing urgency. Madden's handling of this sequence is one of the production’s great pleasures. What begins as a simple task becomes a wonderfully choreographed comic set piece. The accumulating chairs are funny, ridiculous, and oddly unsettling.
As the room fills, so does the audience's investment and role in the couple's reality. At some point, an uncomfortable thought begins to emerge, especially to those on an aisle seat: Please, not me. That tension is where the production does its best work.
Courtney O'Neill's scenic design supports the production beautifully. Layer upon layer of taupe drapes create a world that feels suspended between memory and imagination. Mike Durst's lighting design gives the space depth and mystery, subtly transforming it as the show progresses. Robert Morgan's costumes are equally effective, grounding the characters in a recognizable humanity even as the play drifts further from conventional reality.
Beneath all its absurdity, American Players Theatre's The Chairs is one of the strangest and most moving love stories you'll see this season. But it is also something more unsettling. We wait for the message. We hope for the revelation. We invest in the same promise they have spent a lifetime chasing.
And somewhere along the way, the distance between their lives and our own begins to shrink. We all have stories about who we were supposed to become. The Old Man and Old Woman simply refuse to stop telling theirs.
We laugh at the absurdity until we realize we're laughing at ourselves.
