Review: Bickering Fish in the End Times in Delirium

We like to believe that times of crisis will bring out the best in us, putting our petty disputes in perspective as we come together with our loved ones for the common cause of survival. But Eugène Ionesco knew that was pure delusion.

Despite the war happening right outside their apartment, the two characters in Delirium, director Igor Golyak’s mostly faithful adaptation of Ionesco’s Frenzy for Two, or More, cannot stop arguing about the dumbest question: Is a turtle the same creature as a snail?

She (Chulpan Khamatova) insists that they are, shamelessly arguing her case like she’s Alan Dershowitz defending a serial killer. Exhausted by her sophistry, He (Andrey Burkovskiy) can only tell her that she’s wrong, but declines to explain further. What would be the point? She regrets leaving her husband for him 17 years ago, and he feels the same way. And yet, here they are, stuck together under gunfire, air raids, and the sound of the neighbors being brutally dragged out of their homes (Denis Zabiyaka’s hair-raising sound design suggests a cinematic landscape of carnage just beyond the theater walls).

Lest you get too judgy, perhaps you can recall a time when you spent a little too much time online arguing about something trivial (pineapple on pizza, or perhaps the color of a dress) as the republic crumbled around you. Ionesco’s 1962 play persuasively shows us the thin patina of civilization, which is always just a few scratches away from barbarism, leaving those of us in the cossetted middle class as helpless as goldfish swimming around in our customized tanks, eagerly awaiting the pellets of our next Grubhub order.

To underline this point, Golyak has placed center stage an actual tank populated by a fat goldfish, this season’s most reluctant player. It swims around nervously eying the audience (and hungrily eying its costars) as Jan Pappelbaum and Cecilia Xuetong Feng’s horrifyingly dynamic set of scaffolding and corrugated iron implodes around it. This decidedly unfun house is full of unpleasant surprises, accentuated by Jeff Adelberg’s apocalyptic lighting.

Both designers make excellent use of the haunted gymnatorium vibe of the Space at Irondale, a versatile theater that suggests both Brooklyn’s faded past and near future. Clouds of debris waft from the stage, further soiling Sasha Ageeva’s hobo millionaire costumes (standard-issue in Absurdist theater). It all feels dangerous and terribly bleak.

And yet Golyak creates moments of transcendence and even whimsy in this play that highlights the absurdity of codependence but also illuminates the beauty of a culture for two buoyed by hope and imagination. Anna Drubich’s original compositions gorgeously underscore these spiritual oases, wrapping the audience in an aural bear hug.

In addition to delivering the kind of gutsy physical performances we have come to expect from actors trained in what remains of the Soviet system of state-subsidized theaters, Burkovskiy and Khamatova radiate a magnetic attraction that makes their characters’ relationship not only plausible but irrepressible. We know why they keep coming back for more, even as they drive each other slowly insane.

Delirium is a shining example of why I keep coming back for more from Golyak and his Arlekin Players Theatre, a troupe that demands your attention and rarely disappoints. Muscular performances and jaw-dropping design come together seamlessly for an evening of theater that will linger in my memory for a long time.