THE CLOCK STRIKES SEVENTEEN. In a middle-class house in London, Mr. and Mrs. Smith have finished their supper. By the fireside, they chat about the benefits of yogurt for digestion and a family in which everyone is named Bobby Watson. Mr. and Mrs. Martin then arrive and discover with surprise that they are man and wife. Suddenly, a firefighter then appears in search of a blaze to extinguish.

In this emblematic example of the theatre of the absurd, Eugène Ionesco uses wacky and ludicrous remarks to sketch characters who inhabit a universe where rationality and time simply do not exist.

Chanda Gibson stages this 20^th-century masterpiece, a play that takes perverse pleasure in exposing the emptiness of language, the discomforts that make the modern West a place of “non-sense,” and the artifices that underlie human relationships. Here is an absurd world obsessed with communication in which characters say nothing. In short, a world not so far from our own…