“Ambitious undertakings at the Esquire,” The Daily Cardinal

Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, playing through this weekend at the Esquire Theater, 113 E. Mifflin St., is an ambitious undertaking. The result is only the narrowest success.

The story concerns a senescent couple, married — though ensuing information seems to contradict this point — for 75 years. The Old Man, 95 years old, has lived a life whose unfulfilled promise is his wife’s preoccupation. He is little more than a child, seeking solace in her lap, weeping and calling for his “mamma.” Yet he considers his failure simply the consequence of miscommunication, having found neither the appropriate audience nor the appropriate words to convey his universal message. So finally he engages the services of a professional orator and invites a veritable swarm of imaginary guests — “all the owners and all the intellectuals,” “the papacy, the papayas and the papers” — to hear his message.

This is the premise of Ionesco’s 49-year-old tragic-farce, one that makes heavy demands on its two principals. As the old woman and the old man, Emily Mueller and Christian P. Clarke are unfit for Ionesco’s challenge, putting up valiant efforts nonetheless. Clarke makes impressive work of articulating his many lines and sustaining the frenzied whirl of the playwright’s script (translated from French). Mueller, for her part, is perhaps absurdly limber for a 94-year-old woman whose main function it is to bring the show to its raucous, chair-toting climax. Together they deftly synchronize their lines — once in counterpoint, at another point in droll unity. Unfortunately, they both seem oblivious to their audience, in much the way their characters are oblivious to reality. Clarke, especially, embellishes his lines with bravura flourishes and shrill crescendos but does so with a rote cadence and diction devoid of human emotion.

Ionesco has been dubbed a playwright of silence and silences are an essential component of his script for The Chairs. But there are only half-note and quarter-note rests where there should be several measures’ rest. That’s a problem that director Matt Dufek doesn’t solve. He is correct in urging a swift pace for the show, but the show comes off rushed and chaotic. That is, until the Orator makes his inconceivably prolonged entrance. As the Orator, David Pedersen more than steals the show; he redeems it. He is a brilliantly restrained foil to the old man and old woman, who, in his careful, calibrated movement, gives the show an unforeseen indelible quality. He also gives an otherwise ugly production an aesthetic that derives from his paradoxically immaculate costume and makeup and his pantomimic finesse.

Regardless of who or how imaginatively one plays the Orator, Ionesco wrote the part to subvert the apparent logic of everything that preceded it. In a room full of imaginary guests, here is a living, breathing human being — displaced from the surroundings as he may actually be. That he is a deaf-mute, able to communicate in only baffling fragments, both spoken and written, is the superb irony of the play.

Kindertransport, a second play being staged through this weekend at the Esquire, merits here the same attention normally given the opening act in a concert review. Diane Samuels’s recent play, set simultaneously in WWII Germany and contemporary England, is a conventional story of family relationships and reconciling a troubling past. Only it unfolds in an unconventional manner that attempts to transcend the limitations imposed by the stage. The result is initially confusing, requiring the audience to make hasty deductions that detract from the pertinent and, at times, poignant, events of the developing story. The acting is sincere and efficient and noticeably richer than that of The Chairs.