'The Chairs' at American Players Theatre is an exercise in absurdism

Dan Koehn, Isthmus

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.

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