The Uneasy Chair
Evan Smith’s The Uneasy Chair could be Nagg and Nell’s backstory–the tale of how they ended up in those trash cans. Albeit in a loose sort of way. Written in the late 1990s, Smith’s comedy was almost certainly never meant to be anything more than a frothy exercise in creative anachronism, demonstrating his command of high Victorian setting and style. But as that outspoken audience member recognized and explained to the rest of us on October 6, there’s a touch of hellishness to The Uneasy Chair that Beckett might have appreciated. And Beckett isn’t the only absurdist that Smith’s script brings to mind. The early going feels like Oscar Wilde processed through Eugene Ionesco–specifically, Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, in which people are always getting their etiquette right and reality wrong.
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Hence also Beckett. Give them a few years and a couple of world wars, and the Wicketts might be Nagg and Nell: emblems of an age, an empire, and a set of social conventions consigned to the trash cans of history.
Where: Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe
