The Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco confronted the confusion of the decades following World War II by helping to invent a style of theater that leaned into the absurd contradictions of the era, the push and pull of increasingly powerful nations seeking to impose peace and order amid ever-escalating threats of violence and even nuclear annihilation. Works like his 1959 hit Rhinoceros, a parable of mass conformity in the face of fascism, seem ripe for a MAGA-era makeover.
But Ionesco is a tough sell for contemporary audiences. His metaphors can seem obvious, his dialogue abstruse. And while the bitterness of his satire remains piquant there’s a reliance on vaudevillean clowning that is stubbornly old-fashioned. That’s what makes Igor Golyak’s Delirium, an adaptation of Ionesco’s lesser-known 1962 play typically translated as Frenzy for Two, or More, all the more surprising in its rib-tickling, thought-provoking success. Golyak, who injected considerable visual style into previous productions like the three-hour Holocaust drama Our Class and The Merchant of Venice, brings a similar craftsmanship to this one-act two-hander. This is a dark comedy for the age of doomscrolling.
He’s found two gifted clowns in Andrey Burkovskiy and Chulpan Khamatova as a bickering childless couple of 17 years standing who enjoy an uneasy co-existence in an apartment while bombs and gunfire sound just outside in an ongoing civil war that forever threatens to shatter their uneasy domestic arrangement. The particulars of their situation — including where they are — matter less than how humans living amid years-long conflict manage to eke out a sense of normalcy. So, we watch as their squabbles over ephemera like the difference between turtles and snails become all the more heated to distract from the very real external threats that they dare not focus on instead. Every time one threatens to leave, a grenade or violent knock on a neighbor’s door prompts them to retreat into each other’s arms.
Burkovskiy, a veteran of many productions with Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theatre, has the long-limbed flexibility of a silent-film comic, and he milks simple bits of physical comedy for big laughs. Khamatova, doffing a water-soaked wig and a variety of faux-fur-lined coat (costumes by Sasha Ageeva), has a daffy energy that combines elements of Betty Boop, Jennifer Coolidge, and a no-nonsense broad from a precode Hollywood comedy. Together, they forge a convincing portrait of a couple drawn together in misfortune even when they’re not driving each other up a wall. Plus, they are very, very funny.
Yes, Delirium does dawdle in the late middle section; Golyak could have easily trimmed 10 to 15 minutes of somewhat repetitive material. But there’s an understated elegance to the production, from Denis Zabiyaka’s immersive sound to Jeff Adelberg’s lighting to Jan Pappelbaum and Ccilia Xuetong Feng’s prop and set design, an Erector-set like frame that yields multiple surprises as the evening unfolds.
What Delirium gets right is capturing the lengths to which people will go to normalize the extreme, the rationalizations of people who’ve grown accustomed to untenable situations — whether domestic or political. “Instead of dying alone, some people get themselves killed by others,” Burkovskiy’s character scoffs at one point. “They haven’t got the patience.” To which Khamatova’s woman responds, “Maybe it makes them think it’s not real death yet.” Here is a couple whose only instinct seems to be survive, no matter the cost to each other or to their overall well-being. Which makes the show’s final tableaux, a glimpse of real-world horror through a magical-thinking lens, such a powerful punch to the gut. ★★★★☆
DELIRIUM
The Space at Irondale, Brooklyn
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 7 for $69 to $129