At times like these most people just keep slogging on. Occasionally someone goes berserk and starts jabbering in a supermarket queue. This, if you like, is absurd drama in its rawest form - the seemingly unintelligible ravings of a lunatic who can no longer play the game. Other dramatists had written about the senselessness of life but they had treated the idea in fairly conventional ways. Not the absurdists.
Absurd drama challenges the audience to make sense of nonsense.
They are presumably husband and wife and have been together for decades. The old man is convinced he has something important to say before he dies, and, encouraged by his wife, invites a large, select audience to hear his message. But the old man does not deliver the message he has been working on for 75 years. Whereas past productions I've seen have labored the snobby, avant-garde intellectualism of it all, director Douglas Horton has made the play entertaining, comical, and, most importantly, highly accessible. The Chairs is a fun production and you don't have to have a degree in 20th century continental philosophy to enjoy yourself.