Bald Soprano, The: A Christmas Anti-Play

City Garage successfully revisits its 2007 production of The Bald Soprano, the famous absurdist comedy by Eugene Ionesco. City Garage's French-born artistic director Frederique Michel is an Ionesco specialist, as this production proves yet again.

Working from her own English translation/adaptation, Michel sets the story at Christmas time (hence the play's new subtitle). On view are a Dali-esque Christmas tree, an upside down clock, and a parking meter, with Santa and the elves suspended overhead in a toy gondola. Otherwise, the living room of Mr & Mrs Smith looks perfectly normal, elegant and bourgeois (kudos to set designer Charles Duncombe).

Ionesco's maniacal assault on all things suburban -- language, logic and family -- begins with Mrs. Smith, herself. Played in drag by David E. Frank, she babbles mindlessly about banal things, while Mr Smith (Jeff Atik) sits reading a business newspaper and mouthing non sequiturs in a largely incomprehensible tongue. Then a young couple, the Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), arrive and, after some desultory small talk, discover that they are married to each other.

Other bizarre characters include a cheeky and sexy French maid (Lena Kay) and a fire chief (Mitchel Colley, alternating with Kenneth Rudnicki). Their disconnected and ditzy dialogue is punctuated with the tolling of bells and clocks and the crowing of unseen roosters. The cast delivers Ionesco's mad little play easily and stylishly (having served in Michel's ensemble for many years, they know how to give the director exactly what she wants).

The Bald Sopranois fresh and funny this time around, but it left me wishing City Garage had put a second Ionesco play on the bill.