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.