Ionesco’s ‘Killing Game’ remains an absurdist and somewhat timely experience

Angela Alise (left) and Lance Baker in A Red Orchid’s production of “Killing Game.” | Fadeout Foto

When Ionesco hits, he hits hard. Often, his more than 40 decades-old words sound almost prophetic.

Not a spoiler: Everybody dies.

Eugene Ionesco’s “Killing Game” surely holds the record for dead bodies on stage. Everyone in A Red Orchid Theatre’s disjointed, trippy production perishes at least once. Many three times or more. Usually quite abruptly, without preamble or grace.

Why the copious corpses? Because this is the story of what happens when death strikes at random, coming not only for the elderly and/or infirm but for the young and healthy as well. First, rulers try to contain the plague with martial law. Then a quarantine. Then people suspected of being sick/consorting with those who are sick are gunned down in the street. Meanwhile, wild-eyed conspiracy theorists speculate about terrorists and who unleashed the plague in the first place.

In the 1980s and 1990s, “Killing Game” (published in 1970) read as a horrifying take on the AIDs pandemic and the way victims were shunned and mistreated. Today, the 90-minute absurdist drama feels like a plea for the world to wake up and face the dangers of fear-based tyranny and its malevolent twin, weaponized ignorance.

Directed by the single-named Dado, “Killing Game” is uneven. The ensemble’s abilities range from Academy Award nominee (and A Red Orchid ensemble member) Michael Shannon via vide) to community theater. Moreover, Dado seems to delight in making swaths of the production defiantly inaccessible and repetitively alienating. As one wildly surreal, borderline nonsensical scene after another passes, you’ll encounter only flashes of profundity and clarity. On balance, it’s a 70-30 proposition: 70 percent directorial indulgence and 30 percent trenchant commentary about everything from mob rule to victim-blaming.

Sometimes, “Killing Game” evokes Edger Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” sometimes Albert Camus’ “The Plague.” Chekhov gets a literal shout-out. At lights up, the audience sees fantastical montages of townsfolk carrying mutated body parts the color of cinders (Samantha Rausch’s sculptures are fascinating). One woman has a head, complete with hair. We eventually learn we’re in a world besieged. Something is killing people at random, a plague bereft of all hope.

The dialogue is intermittently sung or chanted, at one point accompanied by the cast’s percussive stylings of eggbeaters, ice tongs and other kitchen gadgets. A huge, ragged black figure totters on stilts, lurking in shadowed corners. There are full-on dance numbers, complete with hats.

A plot emerges through the surreal haze. As the world lays dying, the healthy claim sickness is a moral failing. The wealthy attempt to wall themselves off from the lazy, less-evolved, lower classes. Some sort of despotic ruler (Shannon) shows up on camera to announce a ban on all public meetings, among other basic civil rights. Doug Vickers delivers a chilling, smug monologue on how the sick prefer to be sick and that death only happens to those who deserve it. Cannibalism becomes widespread, the rich literally eating the poor. Those who buck the status quo are viewed as threats to be neutralized. It’s not a subtle world view, but it’s dismally familiar.

Doug Vickers in a scene from “Killing Game” at A Red Orchid Theatre. | Fadeout Foto

That familiarity comes in spite of Dado’s showy obfuscations. She weaves the production through with a lot fuss without meaning — atonal musical numbers; passages delivered as if by robots in flat, marching unison; flickering, fragmented visuals; stylized movements randomly punctuating the action.

Still, it becomes clear that life is getting harsher and crueler and that people are becoming immune to sadness or loss. The bleakest scenario results: If something as irrevocable as death warrants only a shrug, life doesn’t mean anything either.

Vickers isn’t the only standout in the cast. Sherman Edwards delivers sardonic attitude and gallows humor as a prison employee determined to ride out the plague behind bars. Lance Baker gives maximum creepiness to a Sphinx-like patriarchal elder. In one early scene, Londen Shannon is accused of killing everybody he encounters — and many people he doesn’t. It’s impossible to watch without thinking of Illinois’ history of wrongful incarceration.

When Ionesco hits, he hits hard. Often, his more than 40 decades-old words sound almost prophetic in their timeliness. That’s the vein of pure silver embedded within Dado’s unnecessary flourishes. If you’ve got the patience to disregard the extraneous nuttiness, “Killing Game” is worth taking in.

Catey Sullivan is a local freelance writer.