'The Chairs' hosts a party for the end of the world at APT

Lindsay Christians, The Cap Times

Welcome to the island. Our hosts — a married couple in their 90s, gregarious to a fault — have prepared a message, to be delivered by a famous orator.

Tonight, we are “the leftovers of humanity.” Please, pull up a chair. There are plenty.

The island as a place of isolation and reckoning frames Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist 1951 play “The Chairs,” which runs indoors in the Touchstone at American Players Theatre through Sept. 27.

(Incidentally, a remote island is also the site of “And Then There Were None,” Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, now onstage at Milwaukee Rep. Just in case you want a theatrical island two-fer this summer.)

As directed by Vanessa Stalling, “The Chairs” is a type of surreal, unsettling theater we don’t see produced much, though APT has dug into the existential weirdness of Ionesco before (namely “Exit the King” in 2018, a chaotic march toward death that, like “The Chairs,” also starred James Ridge).

“The Chairs” opens on the Old Woman (Colleen Madden, nearly unrecognizable in clownish makeup) as she rolls on a ghost light — a single bulb on a rolling stand, of the kind theaters leave on after hours. In a bit of French-looking mime work, she pulls on a wig and wrestles with a chair before calling to her husband, the Old Man (Ridge).