Commentary: At the end of the play’s opening scene, the entire ensemble lays on the floor dead: A death count rivaling Shakespeare at his most violent, and the night had just begun.
Yet what a pleasure it was to see the Black Box Theatre full on the opening night of a Eugène Ionesco revival this weekend — and for one of his more obscure and difficult plays, yet.
The No Strings Theatre Company is greeting the new year with a production of “The Killing Game,” a stark-looking suite of mordantly funny scenes about a plague. The play, first produced 50 years ago, somehow feels dated and relevant at the same time, in part because director Marissa Bond and her ensemble approach it without excessive seriousness.
A mysterious plague descends on a city and the result is chaos, panic, paranoia, madness. A germophobic rich man (Josh Taulbee) hides away in his mansion insisting every inch of the house, and even his food, are sprayed with disinfectant. A pair of prisoners (Karen Buerdsell, Vanessa Dabovich) attempting to break out of prison are offered their freedom by a guard (Teddy Aspen-Sanchez) who tells them of the rampaging plague and warns them, “The real prison is outside.”
People withdraw from human contact, surmising that plague victims have brought it on themselves because they were unvirtuous or had the wrong politics; some take up arms; scholars look in vain for answers in books, before falling dead on top of them; and political leaders emerge from the rabble, of course, using the scourge as a means to recruit followers, promising that while the plague may never be eliminated, they will change its meaning.
As far as making meaning, the plague can stand in for other fears plaguing (so to speak) our fragile societies: nuclear war, climate disruption, the rise of authoritarian rulers, waves of refugees. In "The Killing Game," the scenes amount to variations on the theme of isolation and dread.
The play may have been written long before the advent of social media, but there are frequent echoes of the vitriol and misinformation "virally" infecting us through our ubiquitous pocket-sized computer-phones.
Ionesco’s plays are often described as “theater of the absurd,” though he himself described his work as a theater of derision. He recoiled from theater that was serious or didactic, mocked political ideology in art and argued for a theater and literature that were playful. One might describe "The Killing Game" as Monty Python’s dying circus.
Bond and her cast of 13 get it just about right. Taken too seriously, the play would easily come off as nihilistic and hopeless; a general audience might feel lost in dialogue loaded with non sequiturs and odd leaps, with no sympathetic or reasonable character to follow.
Here, however, the scenes are played simply and clearly enough, with few props or costume changes, sometimes a tad slowly but at other times brisk, with its frequent scene changes mercifully swift.
Relax, take in the play unseriously and the themes should emerge plainly, as when Buerdsell and Aspen-Sanchez play a scene as an elderly couple still trying late in life to negotiate, before it is too late, how to love one another and why it matters. Never fear, however: Someone dies while they are trying to figure it out.
In the end, as the play’s finale reminds us, it is always something. Good night, and good luck.
“The Killing Game” by Eugène Ionesco is at No Strings Theatre Company in downtown Las Cruces through Feb. 9. For showtimes, ticket prices, and reservations, call 575-523-1223 or visit http://no-strings.org/.