The Timely Review - The Chairs
A public service announcement: The Chairs is the weirdest play I’ve ever seen at APT. If you go in thinking that it will be a lighthearted comedy like As You Like It, or a delightful romp like The Matchmaker, bewildered will you be. This is a 1950s French absurdist play that places its two characters in a wholly abstract realm, at the end of an unreal life, and has them descend into insanity, death, and absolution.
I, of course, did not know this going in, as I prefer to know nothing about anything.
The opening minutes of the play were tense, and slow - unfolding at the frail speed of a hundred year old woman - and as the hundred year old man entered, and the dialog began, the characters began to take shape. It was uncomfortable, realizing that these characters are crazy - I didn’t expect it at first, I attempted to rationalize their words and actions but came up short. Who are these characters? How can I understand them coming to be this way over their lifetime? They just didn’t make any sense. After fifteen minutes, I began, with horror, to wonder: am I going to write a bad review for an APT play?
But fear not, gentle reader, for I come not to bury The Chairs, but to praise them.
Here’s my take on what’s going on here. These two characters are one hundred years old, and have been married for eighty, and live alone on an isolated rock in the ocean, perhaps custodians of a lighthouse. No one visits, and they get off the rock a time or two a year. They have lived for so long with only each other to talk to. And, of course, they get on each others’ nerves.
They came together under some happenstance or fate. Not perfect for each other, by any means, and in their interactions we see the evidence of well worn grooves, of arguments and complaints, of “you always”, and “you never”. But they have developed tricks. We see that their insanity originates in their human life, in the tricks a married couple has developed for managing themselves and each other.
The first such moment is when Colleen is bugging Jim, and Jim asks her to put on a particular character, one that will disarm him by inhabiting a totally different world, perhaps a time and place that they both were in, when she spoke so sweetly to him, in that way, and caused him to feel positively towards her. She interlaces her fingers against her face, tilts, and smiles, beamingly, painted as she is, as though to introduce the character. She then speaks sweetly to him, having been embroiled in well worn conflict mere moments ago. His stomach softens, his shoulders fall. They touch. What she wants is reasonable enough, it’s just that his hackles had been up, and they soften into loving agreement.
The second is when Jim, at Colleen's behest, reluctantly does a silly dance, but does it, and does it right. Please, my poppet. Do the silly dance. If you do the silly dance, I will be positive towards you. You can make me happy, here and now, and in making me happy, you will make yourself happy.
One can imagine that these characters, in their decades, alone, on the rock, in the ocean, where he is content, and she discontent, have developed these characters in their lives, as tools to use. There is, perhaps, advice for marriage contained in this play.
However, these characters’ playing of characters has taken on a more absurd dimension as well. Alone on the rock in the ocean, for lo these many years, they have been starved for social interaction, and they have had to create it for themselves. As the guests arrive, one by one, or two by two, and sit invisibly in the chairs, our characters are fully engaged in a mutual, improvisatory hallucination. They sit with the guest. They appear to listen. Ah, one says. Yes, of course, says the other. They pause to listen - are they hearing the same thing? One conjures up a specific, implied only by their response, of what this phantom has said. Perhaps the young woman is flirtatious. Perhaps the Field Marshal flirts back.
We humans need social interaction, the live drama of the unexpected. What will someone say? But alone on a rock in the ocean, these characters must create it for themselves. A young child's afternoon tea party, worn into a groove through all the decades of adult life, and, therefore, not cute, but somewhat sad and horrifying. This is where I found sympathy for the characters, to imagine these people so starved for human social interaction that they have developed this coping mechanism. We understand them through the humans that they conjure up, what unfulfilled needs they have, what experiences of life that they cannot have alone on the rock in the ocean, but so desperately need. To be able to tell someone off, to flirt up a storm, to be fascinated by. In the first minutes, the characters seemed to be doing strange bits, radical shifts in register and tone, but here I felt the gravity of a lifetime in which this habit was developed.
What made this play so odd, and ultimately so compelling, is this consistent hallucinatory experience. In most plays, when an actor speaks, it is to another character on stage. Simple enough, I've done it myself, speak to another human. And so to watch, as the invisible audience, that form of speaking takes no great leap of the imagination.
One small leap of imagination must be taken in a monologue. Here, a character speaks to no one, but to you, the audience, and to themselves. Their inner thoughts, racing through their head, made audible for our benefit. To hear them spoken is slightly strange - hence the minor leap of imagination - but the inner churn we recognize, and to hear it spoken makes some sense. It is an interior experience, the monologue, and we recognize what it is to be inside of the interior.
In The Chairs, the characters speak to no one. The chairs really are empty, the guests are not here. It's not that the other actors didn't show up for work today, and Jim and Colleen gamely decided to give it a shot anyway. They speak to no one, but not to themselves and not to you. They have, in their mind, a specific Other with whom they are communicating. This Other says things back, the characters listen, they respond and react, but we are not privy to what is said. We must read their faces, Jim’s and Colleen’s, gauge their reactions, to understand what the Other could possibly be saying. It's all happening in their heads, both sides of a conversation - and we can only hear one half. It is unnerving. The actors must so thoroughly commit, and trust the audience to be actively making sense of it all, from the half a play they are seeing. We are responsible for imagining the hallucinations.
There is a moment of audience participation in this play (should I have issued a spoiler alert?) The fourth wall is not broken, but cracked, earlier, when Jim and Colleen shake hands with various audience members, wander back up into the aisles and say hello. The event reaches its climactic delusion when the Emperor shows up, resplendent, divine, perhaps God itself, cloaked in the humble garments of a mere king of kings. Jim and Colleen exhort the audience to rise in jubilation, to raise our hands, and shout, hooray for the emperor. It is not clear at this moment whether they are serious, whether they are speaking to the imagined multitudes that we stand in for, or actually to us, the audience, the human beings sitting in these seats. “Come, stand”, they plead, making eye contact with us. A growing churn fills my stomach. Are we meant to act? Am I meant to act, to stand? To do something I would not otherwise do? To fulfill my part?
I pride myself on my applause, my cheering, on the eager gladness with which I support people doing things live in front of me. When ends a song or scene I see, billowing before me, a cloud of potential cheer, ready to boil over. It is a great joy to make the first clap, of thunder, and of lightning, which releases the pressure of anticipation and cascades into the thousand thunders of applause. “Stand, stand”, they said, and that pressure built all the stranger for its unexpectedness. I saw in it not the weight of imposition but the soaring plea of support. And so I saw, that the me that I want to be, stands first when asked. And so I stood.
Several others were in motion at the same time, themselves having just decided that they could be the first. It is that decision that counts, to have decided to be first when no one had yet been first, to set their body in motion. Given my position - in the Best Standing Spot in the House, lit by the stage lights, standing right next to Jim, with many seated eyes already looking in my direction - I was primed to be an example. I stood, the cascade began. Within seconds, all were standing. “Thank you”, said Jim, to me, with a bow. And I was glad.
The language of the play at first raised my hackles. Again, it’s an absurdist play from 1952, written originally in French. The language is not natural. But bit by bit, it caught me, the ideas of the play, and struck me, in a Truman Show way, as rather relevant to my own life and self and circumstances. Jim has a Message. He's been working on it all his life - two hours a day, says Colleen - but never shared it with the world, never presented it to another, other than his wife, who believes in him for it, though she laments all of the things he could have been, a mourned for other life where he had realized his gifts and actually been that somebody that shared a Message that could change the world, to the world.
I feel that I have a message, some thing to say, or do, or show, or share - why else would I be writing to you, dear reader? The warning of the play is of the century-long life in which I never find the courage to share that message, of the bottomless regret that might weigh me down.
Jim cannot say his message, he has hired an orator to finally say it for him. He has given the orator all of his voluminous notes, and he has confidence that the orator will find the beautiful way to say it all. In our most modern times, we can imagine this role perhaps being filled by an artificial intelligence. It could digest a lifetime of writings, and create a clear and compelling, succinct and true conveyance of it all. But this play is written in 1952, and can merely pre-imagine a human or superhuman orator.
When all are assembled, emperor and audience included, the orator arrives, the one additional character in the play. Nate Burger, in a glossy top hat and a coat, looking as confident and dashing as a human can look, gliding with gaudy slowness to the stage.
Jim and Colleen leave before he speaks. In fact, they leap to their deaths into the sea. In another reading of this play, it all takes place in one moment, the moment before death, as the characters’ entire lives flash before their eyes, right as they fall into infinite bliss, or redemption, or nothingness, or everythingness, or into one more try around the sun. They find absolution in being seen and witnessed by God in their fullness, with all potentials realized. Jim's mind has built his message his whole life, and in death, it is shared with all and everything.
The orator moves to speak, we cannot imagine what he will say. What is the distillation of this message? He opens his mouth, and out comes gibberish.
It is a joke at first. I gather that in the script, he can neither speak nor hear, and so, though he understands the Message, he cannot speak it. But in my mind, I saw him speak in another tongue. He did actually say it, the Message. In the divine tongue, a lifetime worth of message making can be distilled into a mere handful of syllables, whistles and chirps. Who's to say? He says precious little, we do not understand, he loses his confidence, mere man after all. We reject him, in his mind, having heard the divine tongue as loathsome gibberish. He leaves, falteringly, and the play ends.
Four Roles to Highlight.
Jim Ridge: Jim can stand still and tremble with the best of them. At one point, when he was standing right next to me, and having a deep and painful interaction with a phantom character, I could see behind his face the gears turning. I could see him making sense of his hallucinated interaction. He stood above me, to my left, staring up the aisle at a someone in the nothing. It made me believe.
Colleen Madden: An incredible physical comedian, playing aged with a wink, hauling in the towers of stairs, rubbing upon the phantom Field Marshal, painted face giving a larger than life glow to every cheerful, desperate motion.
Nate Burger: Never have I seen such a dashing figure cut, in life or upon the screen.
Myself: I think I did a pretty good job. I prepared for my role by living a life and inhabiting a present that made me resonate uncomfortably and deeply with the themes of the play. And I stood up. Next time, I hope to be listed on the play bill.
So, see this strange and wonderful play, The Chairs, if you can. But go in with eyes wide open, knowing that you know not what to expect. You've got to be willing to commit to this play, to take the second leap of imagination, to read it all as allegory, or as commentary, perhaps on you, perhaps on me.
Forewarned,
Twin Crix
