MC’s Hill directs Ionesco’s ‘The Chairs’
MONMOUTH, Ill. — Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” an unusual French “theater of the absurd” production, will be performed by Monmouth College’s Crimson Masque Nov. 21-23 in the college’s Wells Theater.
The curtain will open at 7:30 p.m. for the Friday and Saturday performances and at 2 p.m. on Sunday. General admission tickets are $2 and can be purchased at the door or can be reserved by contacting theater professor Bill Wallace at 309-457-2374 or billw@monm.edu.
The production is being directed by Tom Hill, a senior from Chicago, as part of an independent theater project. According to Alisa Roost, assistant professor of communication and theater arts and Hill’s project supervisor, the student director “has a really excellent visual imagination” and has “put a slight realist spin on an absurdist play.”
The cast of the play features Phil Johnson, a junior from Wauconda, and Stephanie M. Haas, a freshman from Geneva, as a couple who invites a variety of characters to visit them.
As the play progresses, each of the characters is announced and a chair is brought in for them. Unfortunately, only the characters on stage can see the visitors. The show has some surprisingly humorous moments and is quite interesting in terms of the world inhabited by the minds of the main characters.
Also featured in the cast is Kelly Winfrey, a sophomore from Peoria, who, as “the Orator,” brings the play to a conclusion.
Given the subject matter, the show is probably not suitable for preteens.