Gut Renos of Ionesco and Chekhov
Igor Golyak’s “Delirium,” a madcap, sneakily emotional reinvention of the 1962 Eugène Ionesco play “Frenzy for Two, or More,” opens with an alarming tableau: a dust-coated man is lying face down, crushed by a heavy door that covers his back like a turtle’s shell. He wears an infantry helmet but also a fancy suit with a cummerbund, and after wriggling out from under the door he props it up so that it faces him, knocks on it in a panic, and finally “breaks in” to the room he’s created. Then, making himself at home, he sits on a stack of four mattresses, which emit a loud groan. The night I attended, the audience giggled uneasily—a woman was clearly trapped down there, pancaked between mattresses as if buried in rubble. The man rescued her, but first he bounced on the bed a bit, experimentally, playing her groans like a piano.
This is our introduction to He and She, two clownish, pugilistic lovers who are locked in a war of words, even as a literal war rages outside. Golyak, an avant-garde director trained in Moscow, has made a set of aggressive edits to Ionesco’s surreal post-Second World War farce, trimming roles, amping up the slapstick, and framing the stage in industrial scaffolding draped with wobbly sheets of corrugated metal, which threaten to come crashing down. Golyak has added a big orange fish, which floats buoyantly in an aquarium, and he’s replaced the tatty bathrobes that Ionesco gave the couple with seedy Vegas finery, as if they’d dressed for a party that will never start. He’s made elegant additions, too, such as stitching in a lovely fairy tale that Ionesco wrote for his daughter and staging it with a whimsical storm of soap bubbles. Still, the core of the show remains the same: a couple ignores a public battle for a private one. Early in the play, She fumes at He, “A snail and a turtle, they’re the same thing!” Later, He holds up a telephone and insists it’s cheese. When grenades fly through their windows, they toss them back out, eager to resume their debate.
Golyak, whose parents fled Ukraine for Boston when he was nine, is the scrappy founder of Arlekin, a theatre company in Needham, Massachusetts, that is composed mainly of immigrants. His inventive productions often explore real-life stories of violence and displacement, including the much praised “Our Class,” which centers on an infamous pogrom in which Poles burned their Jewish neighbors to death in a barn. “Delirium,” in contrast, feels universal, a serum synthesized after the Second World War that still applies to modern wounds. He and She could be stuck in any war, in any room, anywhere in the world. And yet their repartee, full of insults (“Seducer!”) and loony demands (“Give me the definition of ‘insinuation’!”), is warped in the way contemporary language is warped: they’re gaslighting and trolling each other, like posters on some ancient Reddit thread that can no longer be parsed by outsiders. On the director’s Substack, “Theater of Questions,” he describes Ionesco’s absurdist scenario as a “shell” emptied of meaning, and this is true on multiple levels: the words are placeholders shuffled around in a deceptive game; they suggest scattered bullet casings, the residue of violence; they are safe places to hide out in, a rigid cover for vulnerable beings—turtles, snails, refugees—who are looking for comfort. But Golyak’s most significant intervention is to amplify the central romance, by slicing in flashes of sensuality and warmth, making He and She seem less like nemeses than like intimate partners, constructing a bridge of private jokes that allows them to shimmy their way past dread.
“Delirium” also felt like a relief to me—it offered a break from the usual polemic realism. Absurdity can be a liberation: it’s permission to stop making sense, an open door to ambiguity. Still, what makes Golyak’s production really roar into flame is the astonishing magnetism of his performers, Chulpan Khamatova, a Russian theatre and movie star who fled her homeland because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Andrey Burkovskiy, a celebrated Russian figure skater and actor. They’ve got Chaplin chops, with Khamatova a mischievous Kewpie doll in a mop-top blond wig and Burkovskiy a craggy acrobat whose expressions shift, like tectonic plates, from petulance to yearning. In Golyak’s vision, these two are not dead-eyed Rock ’Em Sock ’Em robots but flawed, tender humans who are vain, silly, angry, defensive, horny, innocent, and triumphant. Mainly, however, they’re terrified, and determined to fend off that fear. They eavesdrop on their neighbors, who are being kidnapped or, perhaps, tortured. Objects tumble from the scaffolding; bombs explode. But the couple’s focus is ultimately on each other. When a bullet flies into the room, each instinctively turns and asks, “Are you hurt?” Only once they know that they’re safe can the game begin again.
Simon Stone’s glamorous renovation of Chekhov’s tragicomic masterpiece “The Cherry Orchard” attempts something similar, with less success. In Stone’s version of the play, which is performed in Korean with English subtitles, he retains Chekhov’s plot about a fading aristocratic clan in denial about the sale of its home, but he dilutes the poetry, simplifies the characters, and flattens the themes, producing something like a deep-plane facelift—it’s pretty but unnervingly smooth. Stone’s “Cherry Orchard,” set in modern Seoul, is about a spoiled, wealthy family, the Songs, who run a corporation that is on the verge of collapse, owing to the family’s mismanagement. In place of a decrepit manor, the Songs live in a fabulous modernist mansion with a high-peaked slanted roof that cascades, in dramatic fashion, all the way to the ground in the form of a wide, tiered staircase, calling to mind a game of Chutes and Ladders—some characters will rise, others will tumble down. The actors regularly jog up to the peak, where they declaim their political beliefs, brood, or threaten suicide. The front of the house is all glass—a lousy place to throw stones.
That set, which was designed by Saul Kim, is genuinely spectacular to look at, as are the bright, casual costumes and the clever lighting. The cast is game, too, particularly Son Sang-kyu, who is very funny as a feckless chatterbox with a thing for retro record players, and Moon Choi, who plays the moodier, more legitimately aggrieved of two Song daughters. I was initially intrigued by Stone’s commitment to laughs, with the “tragi-” ripped off Chekhov’s comedy like a sales tag. Unfortunately, the results, while splashily entertaining, feel helium-light instead of morally weighty, with each encounter at once high-stakes and emotionally obvious. The players flatly declare their judgments: “She has ideas well above her station. It’s not appropriate.” They get sloppy drunk, then trauma-dump or make ill-advised passes, then apologize. By the final act, Chekhov’s subtle, empathetic, often unspoken power dynamics feel transmuted into a soapy romp that gestures at the class-warfare themes of “Succession” or “Parasite,” but without the former’s black wit or the latter’s pungency.
Instead, there’s a Bravo oomph to the shenanigans. Jeon Do-yeon, who plays the family’s matriarch, is colorfully slinky as a globe-trotting party widow, a vain, compulsively seductive narcissist who macks on her daughters’ men like a Real Housewife given a villain’s edit. A set of interlocking love triangles scores harsh laughs off familiar archetypes: a fuckboy, an incel, a soy boy, a finance bro who won’t commit. But farce can take you only so far. When there are glimmers, here and there, of unexpected angles—a sweet, strange speech about an abandoned turntable; the gentle bond between the younger Song daughter and a left-wing scholar—they quickly dissolve, subsumed by the archly satirical twists of the plot. Without authentic longing, and without any bittersweet complexity to the portrait of one social order replacing another, we’re left with little more than puffs of amusement, enough to escalate your mood but bound to fade by morning. ♦