Tragic Farce by Eugen Ionescu
Translation: Dan C. Mihăilescu

Artistic director: Emil Gaju
Scenography: Gyöngye Újvárossy Kerekes
Soundtrack: Florian Chelu
Premiere date: February 16, 1995

A text with metaphysical ambitions, as the author himself confesses, and claiming to be a model for the Caragiale farce "Conu Leonida facing the Reaction", the play "The Chairs" brings to the fore the couple Old Man and Old Woman, two quasi-anonymous characters, without a biography, who have been living for years and years a life of exorbitant platitude, dominated by boredom, banality and repetition: "For seventy-five years, since I got married, every evening, but absolutely every evening, you have made me tell you the same story, to imitate you the same months... always the same thing... let's talk about something else..." (Old Man).

And yet, an event with very special connotations breaks this existential monotony: the reunion at their home of great personalities – „scientists, landlords, guards, bishops, chemists, boilermakers, violinists, delegates, presidents, policemen, merchants” and the Emperor himself – will be the setting in which the Old Man will further transmit to humanity his lifelong message. His inability to put this conclusion into words makes him call on the services of a professional Orator. While waiting for him, the two old men allow themselves to be seized by a frenetic agitation, welcoming the guests and providing them with chairs. The guests, however, are invisible and gradually, the old men are overwhelmed by these presences that are actually absences that crowd together until they are a crushing, suffocating crowd. The agitation reaches its climax when the two lose themselves in opposite corners of an empty room.

Upon the arrival of the Orator, reassured that they have not lived in vain, the old men throw themselves into the void through two windows far from each other; but the Orator is mute, and his incomprehensible moans ("He, mme, mm, mm") resemble those of the mute, essentially equivalent to silence.

In the July 1956 issue of the magazine "Spectacles", Eugen Ionescu declared: the theme of the play "The Chairs" "is not the message, nor the failures in life, nor the moral disaster of the elderly, but precisely the chairs, that is, the absence of persons, the absence of the Emperor, the absence of God, the absence of matter, the unreality of the world, the metaphysical void - the theme of the play is nothingness."„

Distribution:

The old man:  Eugen Tugulea
Old woman:  Ileana Iurciuc
The speaker:  Ion Abrudan
The woman in white:  Roxana Ivanciu

Technical director: Florin Popescu
Prompter: Iuliana Chelu
Lighting: Vasile Blejan, Iosif Balogh, Laviniu Goron
Sound: Sorin Domide