To give you some idea of how I feel about Eugène Ionesco, I once chose The Chairs for a scene in my high school acting class. While everyone else sensibly gravitated toward the likes of The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, or Our Town, my scene partner and I dressed like a pair of deranged, elderly oddballs out of a Roald Dahl fever dream and performed what was, to our classmates, an incomprehensible clusterfuck about an elderly couple frantically filling their home with chairs for a roomful of invisible guests awaiting a final message to humanity. We raided every empty classroom we could find, hauling in chair after chair until the space (and, presumably, everyone’s patience) gave out. Our peers thought we were insane. They were not wrong.
I offer that not just for the spectacle, but as a kind of origin story. I’ve long been drawn to Ionesco, the famed father of the absurdist theater, a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. I fall firmly in the former camp, though not without some caution. Absurdism has a way of tipping over on itself; what begins as something thrillingly strange can, before long, feel like being on the outside of an inside joke. Which is perhaps why the chance to see Ionesco on a Boston stage, at long last, felt both promising and faintly perilous.
But knowing that Bryn Boice would be at the helm, I should have known better than to worry. In Hub Theatre Company’s new revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, a double bill that could just as easily collapse under the weight of its own strangeness, Boice takes on the unenviable task of making sense of the senseless and, remarkably, brings it into focus.
Loyal readers of Evening Transcript will know that I have a soft spot for historical context, and that I tend to reach for it when it helps unlock a work. In this case, it’s essential. Ionesco was born in Romania and came of age in 1930s Europe, when fascist movements were a daily reality. He watched people around him, even those he respected, begin to align with those ideologies. What unsettled him wasn’t only the politics, but the language. He saw how propagandist slogans replaced thought, how repetition took the place of argument, how words could be emptied of truth and still compel allegiance. Language, in other words, could detach from meaning and yet retain its force.
When he began writing for the theatre in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he didn’t set out to write political dramas in any conventional sense. Instead, he built plays that staged the collapse of language he had observed: dialogue loops, logic collapses, and despite more and more words, meaning thins out or vanishes completely. These works, first staged in the early 1950s, were absurd not because he wanted to be coy or impenetrable, but because he was putting onstage what he had already seen: language severed from truth and entangled with power.
Seventy-five years later, at a moment when language again feels unmoored from meaning and driven more by insistence than truth, his plays land with a jolt of uncomfortable familiarity. It’s no accident that Hub Theatre’s revival feels so attuned to that undercurrent, particularly in Boice’s handling of The Lesson.
In The Bald Soprano, what begins as a polite evening between two couples in an English living room unravels into a cascade of repetition, contradiction, and noise. The more the characters insist on speaking, the less they’re actually saying, until the point where, in a brilliantly staged burst of chaos, language has fractured completely, reduced to something closer to sound than speech. It’s comic, yes — often uproariously so — but beneath the laughter sits something sharper: a portrait of language stripped of meaning.
The Lesson operates on a similar logic, though in a far more concentrated and increasingly brutal key. A seemingly straightforward tutoring session between a mild-mannered professor and an eager young pupil gradually tilts off balance, as language itself becomes a tool of domination. Where The Bald Soprano lets language collapse under its own weight, The Lesson shows what happens when it’s wielded deliberately to assert control. The lesson grows more convoluted and insistent, less tethered to anything resembling sense. With it, the dynamic between teacher and student shifts into something both absurd and terrifying.
Boice leans into the play’s turn toward violence and control with a boldness that may break one of Ionesco’s unwritten rules, his general resistance to pinning these plays to any one explicit political meaning. And yet, without giving too much away, her approach makes the play’s underlying argument unmistakably clear, sharpening its connection to the very forces that first inspired it. It’s a choice that could easily feel imposed, but here it lands as a natural extension of the play’s logic and earns its place.
But no amount of directorial ingenuity can make a dent in absurdist theatre without a cast that understands the machinery of it. It’s easy enough to get on stage and run amok; it’s another thing entirely to sustain that level of heightened, ridiculous language with precision, control, and intent. What looks like chaos has to be anything but. That’s what makes this ensemble so impressive: they are not only in tune with one another, but with the play’s exacting demands.
I was particularly gobsmacked by Siobhán Carroll, an extraordinary presence here, somewhere between Julianne Moore and Shelley Duvall. She threads menace and absurdity with remarkable assurance, the performance shifting in ways that feel both exact and unpredictable. She’s paired with a terrific Cleveland ‘Mac’ Nicoll, who meets her with equal focus, the two of them working in clear, confident sync.
Brooks Reeves, unsurprisingly, makes an equally strong impression, particularly in his second act turn as the professor. His diction and vocal control lend even the most nonsensical passages a highbrow authority, the language relished and articulated with exactness.
Opposite him, Lily Ayotte is perfectly earnest as the pupil, staying locked into the lesson even as it turns against her. She follows that shift beat by beat, the unease building into a mounting panic that carries through to the play’s shocking climax. Rounding out the cast are Lauren Elias, Jessica Golden, and Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia, whose varied, off-kilter contributions complete an ensemble that is as cohesive as it is compulsively watchable.
Boice’s most pervasive intervention, however, is the frame itself. Both plays unfold inside a mid-century television set, something between The Stepford Wives and The Donna Reed Show. Justin Lahue’s set and Marissa Wolf’s costumes lock together in a soft, pastel world where every detail aligns, creating an eerie kind of perfection. Narissa ‘Nars’ Kelliher’s lighting remains largely restrained, shifting only to underscore the plays’ carefully constructed breakdowns. Sound designer Mackenzie Adamick, ever reliable, layers in vintage-sounding jingles and commercials that add just the right touch of atmosphere, with a few pointed contemporary references tucked in.
What’s smart about the television frame is how neatly it fits Ionesco’s obsession with language as a social script. In these plays, people aren’t really talking to each other. They’re performing conversation—the kind of language people repeat because it passes for normal, “how are you?” “good, how are you?”— familiar exchanges we perform without thinking.
Set inside the world of a 1950s television set—the very era these plays first arrived—the idea becomes easier to grasp. A sitcom-like setting comes with its own rules for how people speak: polished, familiar, rehearsed. Heard in that context, the dialogue starts to sound exactly like what it is—language learned, repeated, and performed.
And that lands exactly where Ionesco was aiming: the realization that language can be stripped of meaning and still function—as habit, as performance, and even as a tool of control and oppression.
However you come to Ionesco, with affection, skepticism, or no context at all — this production meets you there. It’s intelligent without being heavy, precise without losing its playfulness, and consistently attuned to the darker currents running beneath the text. What emerges is a reminder that these plays aren’t just relics of mid-century experimentation, but sharp, unsettling reflections of a world we still recognize. You could call it timely, though that almost undersells it. What Boice and her collaborators have done is make Ionesco feel not just legible, but necessary — proof that the strangest works can sometimes tell the clearest truths.
The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. Through March 8 at Hub Theatre Company at Boston Center for the Arts. www.hubtheatreboston.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
