Stephen Hawking chair puppet, with Marit Sirgmets, Jane Catherine Shaw, and Jessica Smith. (Photo: Richard Termine)

Stephen Hawking chair puppet, with Marit Sirgmets, Jane Catherine Shaw, and Jessica Smith. (Photo: Richard Termine)

If your dream answer to “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” is Pussy Riot, Stephen Hawking, Yoko Ono and Gertrude Stein — or if you happen to be a furniture lover and a connoisseur of existential angst — then get thee to The Chairs, premiering this evening at La Mama in the East Village.  

The play is a radical adaptation of a tragic farce that director Theodora Skipitares revisited and found wanting. “I went back and took a look at Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs,” she said. “And I was surprised at how puzzled I was by it, and even disappointed.”

Pussy Riot chair in the Cathedral. Jane Catherine Shaw on the left. (Photo: Richard Termine)

Pussy Riot chair in the Cathedral. Jane Catherine Shaw on the left. (Photo: Richard Termine)

The original play centres on an elderly couple. The Old Man and Old Woman are preparing for dinner guests, to whom an Orator will eventually reveal the Old Man’s monumental discovery. The guests arrive but are invisible and mute, remaining so throughout the play. “The only evidence of them are the chairs, brought in to sort of hold their places,” explains Skipitares.

She found the silent ghostly guests to be no longer relevant to the modern world. “I thought that the chairs themselves could be speakers of the important message to human kind.” So she spent the past year painstakingly crafting 28 exquisite chairs, each representing a different guest. In turn they ring the doorbell, and take their place on the stage as characters — invited in by a 10-foot-tall puppet Old Woman (no Old Man in sight).

From left to right, in distance: Gertrude Stein chair puppet, Ionesco chair puppet, Old Woman puppet. (Photo: Richard Termine)

From left to right, in distance: Gertrude Stein chair puppet, Ionesco chair puppet, Old Woman puppet. (Photo: Richard Termine)

The guests are a mix of famous individuals and ordinary citizens. Both Gertrude Stein and Ionesco himself make an appearance, and though they never met in real life, in Skipitares’ surreal world, they engage in conversation. The rest of the guest-list includes such luminaries as Nelson Mandela, Yoko Ono, Stephen Hawking, Valerie Plame, Sister Wendy of PBS and BBC art-show fame, and even Pussy Riot.

Sadly for furniture collectors who dream of sitting on Hawking’s knee, the chairs are not going to be up for sale after the run of the play. “They’re really sculptural objects,” explains Skipitares. “They’re not very practical as chairs.”

“The Chairs” at La Mama Experimental Theatre, 74A East 4th Street, bet. Bowery & 2nd Ave.; May 23 – June 8

Correction: an earlier version of this post misspelled the name of Valerie Plame