Wrestling with Absurdity: Notes from the Laboratory

As I sit here preparing for my NYTW summer residency at Dartmouth, my mind keeps circling back to Eugene Ionesco's Delirium like a moth drawn to flame. There's something about this play that feels urgently contemporary, even though it was written decades ago.

Or maybe precisely because it was written decades ago.

Sometimes the most profound truths about our present moment come disguised as yesterday's absurdities.

I find myself asking: What kind of dialogue do I want to have with today's audience? How do we unlock this play's heartbeat for our moment, our world, our collective delirium?

The Fever Dreams Begin

You know how it is when you're deep in the work—ideas start breeding with each other in the dark corners of your mind, creating these mutant offspring that you're not sure you want to claim as your own.

Delirium has been doing this to me for weeks now.

I wake up with images that make no sense until I'm three cups of coffee in, and then suddenly they're the most obvious thing in the world.

Vision One: The Concrete Bunker

The first hallucination that grabbed me by the throat: What if the whole thing happens in a concrete bunker?

Very stark, very brutal. I'm seeing this minimalist space where a live-feed camera becomes our main character—more important than the people, maybe. The couple's faces blown up on a massive screen, every pore visible, every micro-expression amplified until their domestic spat about snails versus tortoises becomes this epic, mythic battle.

But then my brain started arguing with itself.

Because what if the camera lies? What if we see their faces on screen but their bodies are doing something completely different on stage? The wife screaming about the snail on the projection while her actual body is calmly making tea.

Which reality do we trust?

(I scribbled in my notebook at 2 AM: "Technology = unreliable narrator?" Then I drew a snail with a human face.)

When Dreams Collide with Living Rooms

But that concrete bunker felt too cold, too removed. So my mind started wandering into this other territory.

Vision Two: The Aggressively Normal Apartment

What if it's just... someone's apartment?

Like, aggressively normal. IKEA furniture. A coffee maker that actually works. Netflix queue visible on the TV.

The couple's polarization—snail people versus tortoise people—suddenly becomes this perfect mirror of how we actually live now. Twitter arguments made flesh. The kind of fight where you end up screaming about pizza toppings while democracy crumbles outside your window.

Here's where it gets fun: we make the audience complicit. Not in some theoretical way, but literally.

The couple turns to the audience mid-fight: "SNAIL OR TORTOISE?"

And we actually vote. Phone app, raise hands, whatever. The room splits. Suddenly the theater becomes the argument.

I got excited thinking about this—what if we plant people in the audience? Secret snail loyalists and tortoise fanatics who start their own arguments? What if the whole theater devolves into chaos while the couple on stage watches, horrified at what they've unleashed?

(Note to self: Check fire safety regulations for audience riots.)

The Time Machine Nobody Asked For

Then this third vision crept in, probably because I'd been watching too much Lepage.

Vision Three: When Time Isn't Linear

What if the couple's argument opens these temporal wounds? What if we see their fight echoing across decades, centuries even?

I started imagining projections of the same actors playing different versions of themselves—younger, older, in different wars, different centuries. The snail/tortoise debate becomes this eternal human compulsion to pick sides over nothing.

Live video feed mixing with historical footage, the couple's silhouettes morphing into soldiers, lovers, enemies, back to lovers.

And here's the image that won't leave me alone: actual snails and a tortoise on stage, filmed live, their slow, ancient movements projected at monumental scale. These tiny creatures becoming giants, gods maybe, while humans scurry around beneath them having their insignificant wars.

But something about this felt too... pretty? Too clean?

Like I was trying to make sense of something that resists sense-making.

The Door to Nowhere

Which brings me to this fourth obsession that's been stalking me.

Vision Four: The Non-Place

What if there is no room at all?

This hit me during a sleepless night when I couldn't stop thinking about refugees, immigrants, anyone who's ever carried their entire life in a suitcase.

The couple in Delirium don't get to have a room. They don't get walls or a ceiling or a floor they can call home.

Instead, the husband straps a door frame to his back—not a door to anywhere, just the frame, the ghost of every room he's ever lost. The wife drags a suitcase that's literally tied to her body, making her into this beautiful, broken creature who can never set her burden down.

The stage becomes this non-place, this liminal space where furniture floats like debris after a flood. A chair with no floor to sit on. A table that serves no meals. The fragments of domesticity without the domestic.

And here's what made me sit up in bed: they're not just homeless—we're all homeless now.

We carry our homes in our phones, in our arguments, in our desperate attempts to make meaning out of chaos. The door frame isn't just his burden; it's our modern condition.

The Music Box That Breaks My Heart

Through all these visions, one element keeps insisting on itself: a tiny music box playing a waltz.

In every version—bunker, apartment, time machine, non-place—this little melody persists.

Picture this: In the middle of their most vicious argument about whether snails have souls or whatever they're fighting about, someone winds the music box. The sound cuts through everything.

For a moment, they remember they're human. Maybe they even sway together, just for three measures, before the spell breaks and they're back to their beautiful, necessary warfare.

But what if—and this is where I think the play wants to go—what if their final moment isn't about resolution?

What if it's about that dawn light creeping in after the longest night, and they're still holding each other, still carrying their impossible burdens, but somehow still breathing?

The music box plays one last time. Not triumph, not defeat. Just... persistence.

The stubborn, absurd, magnificent fact of still being here.

What the Play Wants to Be

I don't know yet what Delirium wants to become. That's the honest truth.

Right now it's all of these visions at once, arguing with each other in my head like the couple on stage. Maybe that's exactly what it should be—uncertain, multiple, refusing to settle into one truth.

All I know is this: we're living in our own delirium right now.

We argue about everything while the world burns. We carry homes that don't exist to places that aren't there. We vote for snails or tortoises while bombs fall like gentle rain turned deadly.

And somewhere, through all the noise, a tiny waltz plays on. A reminder that even in the madness, even when we have no room but what we carry, some part of us still remembers how to dance.

The laboratory awaits. The questions multiply.

And I have absolutely no idea what we're going to discover together.

But I can't wait to find out.

Igor Golyak is spending summer 2025 in residency at New York Theatre Workshop at Dartmouth, developing his adaptation of Ionesco's "Delirium." The project continues his exploration of how theater can bridge worlds and create empathy across all borders.