Remember Ionesco’s The Chairs? In that absurdist classic, the stage is stacked high with chairs brought by a mob of people expecting to hear a hired orator deliver a profound speech about the human condition (which turns out to be gibberish). The old folks who have hired the orator top the action by committing suicide.
There are echoes of Ionesco in Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson, the surreal one-man play now on tap at the Kirk Douglas in a southern California premiere.
As created and performed by Sobelle, a prize-winning physical-theater specialist, The Object Lesson takes place on a set that resembles a warehouse that’s been hit by a recent earthquake. Cardboard boxes, bits of furniture, items of clothing and lighting fixtures have been scattered everywhere on what should have been the stage. A high wall of boxes still stands on one side of the stage, looking as if it might topple over at any minute. The audience sits wherever it can, some on the floor, some on old cushions, some on boxes. Many people just stand, with bewildered looks in their eyes. Welcome to Sobelle’s topsy-turvy world, a world of stuff, junk of all kinds. “Take a box and open it,” Sobelle encourages the audience in a program note. “Explore. Find someone curious in the room and give them something—like that guy over there. The one with the funny hair. Or the girl who looks a bit tired. You could ask them what they’re looking at—just tell them you were told to do so by this piece of paper. Don’t be creepy about it.” Sobelle certainly isn’t creepy about his role in all this. Tall, slightly balding, with a Jacques Tati-like mien, he wanders around in the ruins, acting in a perfectly normal way. He makes a clearing for himself, sits down in an easy chair, calls a friend on his cell-phone, and chats to him in a banal way. Then he plays some 1920s jazz on a wind-up victrola. Talks about the wonderful time he had as a young man in a small French village. There is humor here, but it’s not satirical in the Ionesco way. It’s more shaggy-dog American. He also interacts with a woman in the audience, romances her with a bottle of wine, a candle-lit table, a fresh salad (which he prepares by slipping into a pair of ancient ice skates and leaping up and down on the ingredients with a gleeful look on his face). Death was the sub-text to The Chairs, and in a way, it’s true of The Object Lesson. As he talks about all the junk in his life, Sobelle becomes more obsessive, more desperate. He’s drowning in this sea of useless stuff, he realizes. He then begins to try to get rid of everything. But the harder he tries, the more stuff he throws out, the more keeps piling up before him (in a bit of stage magic that Houdini would have envied). Madly, dementedly, Sobelle tries to free himself of all his entanglements, but his efforts go for naught. He might as well drown himself, the way Ionesco’s nonagenarian couple did.
