Wonderfully, tragically, hauntingly beautiful. And that’s not bad for the self-proclaimed absurd. Absurdism doesn’t (have to, anyway) mean nihilism or frivolity, it does imply a certain pessimism –the central premise, after all, is that life is absurd, which is something of a bummer.

In David Gordon’s adaptation of The Chairs, absurdity is a force to be reckoned with, but not an incontrovertible truth. The two characters, Cookie and Pussycat - and the actors themselves - defy the absurd in this performance. They wrestle with it, fight back. They struggle to invest the silly, stultifying language (literally handed to Pussycat on paper to rattle off) with feeling, if not meaning; to preserve, in the wash of the play’s absurd action, the dignity of their love for each other – that’s right, you dry old Francophiliac existentialists, love - which is, inexplicably, magically, real.

This struggle itself becomes the real plot. “There’s still hope,” says Cookie early in the play. The words seem so vague, so meaningless; but taken at face value, they suddenly give the play a shape. For what is there still hope? For anything, for hope itself. Armed only with these words, blunt instruments indeed, Cookie and Pussycat become our heroes in pursuit of this hope, they become our own hope against the “cold, dark drain,” as Cookie puts it.

Unlike the exhausting stasis of Waiting for Godot, this play is moving, faster than we realize. As the blather of words - and the inevitable chairs  - accumulate, so does our understanding grow of the profound way in which the pair change these words to help each other – they sing them, murmur them, sob them, repeat them and repeat them.

The pair is so effective, are so obviously the victors in the struggle between absurdity and meaning, that the more visible agents of absurdity – the stagehands rushing about willy-nilly with giant words – seemed unnecessary, almost trite. Similarly the inarticulate spokespeople at the end feel gratuitous. They seemed anachronistic, vestiges of a play far more bitter, cynical, dry, and dreary than this one, which almost bled with feeling.

Which leads me to wonder if the strength of this adaptation isn’t such that it has broken the original play, or perhaps broken free of it. As the couple are slowly, and then so quickly, torn apart from each other, it isn’t with our intellects that we in the crowd react, but with our stomachs, with our guts and hearts. The play causes me not to ponder the futility of language but instead to wonder, ‘My God can life really be this amazingly, shockingly beautiful? Is this really happening?”

And the best part is yes, it is. As the play draws to its conclusion, the audience shares in a single, drawn-out wrenching of our hearts, which many of us, I’m sure, were pleasantly surprised to find could still be wrenched. The ending (not the spokespeople, the real one) was sublime – to say more than that would be . . . absurd.

SUMMARY: An old guy with glasses like Robert DeNiro had at the end of Casino and an old woman with a kind of layered look like a homeless person set up chairs for guests at an imaginary party. The chairs are handed to them by some sort of ninja janitors through moving doorframes on wheels.

I was asked to write about this a couple of weeks ago. I said yes not thinking any more of it. Much like when one of my friends asks me if I am going to see his stupid band and I say, "Sure!", discouraging any further discussion after which I instantly forget the whole thing. Erin Jorgensen reminded me several times about my commitment over the last few weeks. "How many hours is it?", I asked, She said she did not know. An absurdist dance piece, was how it was described to me. Of course it is. It started out with a film on a screen of two people dancing sort of modern like with folding chairs and the guy had a huge mustache. This is pretty much what I expected and then the old guy and the old homeless like woman came out and started going on about something, I admit I wasn't paying strict attention at this point and I nodded slightly. But after about 10 minutes of the two establishing their relationship it began to get interesting and I was thinking of things while they were talking, But not things unrelated to the conversation, I was just reminded of events in my own life in the same context. The action got slightly heated and the old woman exposed her breast to an imaginary military figure to whom she had been making sexual advances. It made sense though as I was thinking just before that she was attractive in an old person crazy homeless way. I found myself becoming rather engrossed by this story that was evolving about a party, and when the man said that you are not supposed to bring kids to a party I agreed with him, kids really are a nuisance, I would be irritated as well if someone showed up dragging their ill behaved little cretins making inapproprate loud noises at a party clearly designed for adults. At this point the gathering seemed to mutate into a rally for the producer of something and it took on a political sheen. I have been depressed about almost everything since November 3rd and at this time is when I was most taken by this production. I consider myself a very literal person and I don't understand abstract concepts. I am frankly suspicious of those who claim to and I have been known to make fun of them. Unfortunately however, This is the same posture adopted by groups like the N.E.A. and the Republican party and Hitler. At the end I was ashamed of myself for wanting to hate this and I was greatly relieved that I enjoyed it. I didn't really get it but fuck it, we can't all be Joe Boling and besides it's absurdist anyway.