People laughed. People cried. Mostly we just sat wide-eyed and amazed.

Ionesco's classic one-act, "The Chairs," is an extremely difficult work, and Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, under Tina Brock's brilliant direction, nails it.

The bizarre plot involves an old couple (Bob Schmidt and the breathtakingly brave Tina Brock) living in a lighthouse. Somehow Lisi Stoessel's set design transformed Society Hill Playhouse's Red Room into a white, circular space with two big windows and nine doors. The Old Man has a message for the world and has invited everyone to come to hear it. Many, many guests arrive, invisible to us, but with whom the Old Man and Old Woman talk and flirt and reminisce and explain.

Much of the action of the play involves real chairs being brought in for the guests to sit on. Many, many, many chairs.

The costumes (by Brian Strachan and Rufus Cottman) are as hilarious and tragic as everything else. Like every tiny element in this production, the Old Woman's bridal veil becomes a focus of fascination, speaking much meaning.

As Ionesco eloquently told us, "A work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate - and which sometimes can be communicated. That is its paradox and its truth."

Live Arts/Philly Fringe

For more information on shows, www.livearts-fringe.org or 215-413-1318.

The Annihilation Point. The end is coming with a bang, on 12/12/12 (at 12:12:12, if you need precision), and the reason I know this is Astronaut Z. He told us all in the basement of a building on 12th Street near Vine.

He was utterly serious, saying we were the chosen candidates to save the human race. We, in turn, laughed through the whole thing.

The third time's the charm for Time Mender Productions, which is presenting this clever, polished spoof on the end of the world, or at least humanity. Actually, the first and second times were charms, too - two years ago, when the group staged a funny, rough-around-the-edges Fringe telling of The Jersey Devil in a Northern Liberties church social room, and last year, when a sophisticated production exploring The Giant Squid unfolded weirdly inside a Drexel classroom.

Before the current Fringe even began, The Annihilation Point - "Put the kids to bed . . . forever!!" its slogan commands - was heating the box office; two performances are now added to the original nine. Extensions are rare at the Live Arts/Fringe, where schedules are tight and venues, too. But there is no problem with the staging area for The Annihilation Point - it is in what is called the Art Underground, the raw-walled lower floor of a building in a once-industrial enclave.

The production is high-class Fringey, directed and infused with cybersound by Pig Iron Theatre Company's Dan Rothenberg. It plays out in front of Lisi Stoessel's and Jack Higgins' hulking assemblage of wires and gadgetry called "Mrs. Computer" (the voice of Geneviève Perrier), plus an impressive time machine with smoke and flashing lights, and a large scrim for videos that are really live.

It could not be funnier - I smiled and laughed throughout, even toward the very end, when our annihilation becomes a belabored question before the show picks up in a last-ditch effort to save us all.

The idea evolved from Annihilation's three actors: the full-throated, playful, and commanding Bradley K. Wren (Astronaut Z), who booms the news that humanity is doomed; the expressive physical actor Justin Jain, as an aide from another species; and a meticulously modulated Dave Johnson as a cyborg-in-arms.

Playwright Tim Sawicki, who also lights the show, molded the zaniness into a cohesive script, with such scenes as a look at a typical day in the post-annihilation future, a spirited demonstration of the nanobots that replace cells, and commentary from an impudent baby computer.

And those are just a few. Annihilation has never been such a pleasure. I, for one, was blown away. - Howard Shapiro

Nuda Veritas. This Melissa James Gibson piece ought to be Exhibit A in any argument about why female playwrights do not get produced. Not because it is representative of them, of course, but rather because it is such an easy target: Four women in white pajamas discuss their fragmented thoughts in stilted prose poetry.

Clunkers like, "We decided to reconfigure our psychological makeups" coexist uneasily with irritating attempts at whimsy, such as, "I examine you, sleeping man, and think, 'You are a three-colored licorice square.' " By the time Gibson's characters (supposedly a Greek chorus, but I don't buy it) sing "I've got the solipsistic blues," it's a wonder the audience doesn't chime in with "Amen."

The greater shame is that director Natalie Diener's cast, which contains some truly solid actresses, is so out of this navel-gazer's league. Melissa Lynch, Charlotte Northeast, Laurie Norton, and Christie Parker make the production not only bearable but amiable, a feat that makes one wish Diener's instincts for theater matched her instincts for casting. The only naked truth in Nuda Veritas is that some stereotypes are based in fact, and in this case, the truth hurts. - Wendy Rosenfield

Pretty Young Thang. Local actress/singer Raine Djonson's monologue about a middle-age woman who was physically abused by men, almost as a way of life, has a bittersweetness to it - it conjures up a richly textured '50s African American urban-Philly life. But it never loses focus - kids do not stay kids, and while they are they need to come first.

"You grow up and you remember," her character says, then turns to her dead mother's picture, "and you become the first ones we spit on."

Djonson, in her first Fringe appearance, wrote the monologue, and the veteran theater artist Johnnie Hobbs Jr. directed it, and though it falls somewhere on the softer side of a rant, Pretty Young Thang is solid and sincere in Djonson's execution. Sometimes she addresses her mother, other times the audience. "Wake up, women," she says, and the dual focus works because she means it. - Howard Shapiro

A Singer's Circus. First things first: Jen Fellman has a knockout of a singing voice.

Her solo show, A Singer's Circus, gives us a chance to hear her sing the signature songs of her two favorite singers, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, including "Over the Rainbow" and "La Vie en Rose." The clown connection - there is much chitchat about circus memories - seems an ill-fitting motif in the midst of all these lush, tragic songs.

But the great songs are strung together by an embarrassingly amateurish script, during which we hear about Fellman's childhood and watch home movies. Her confessed (at considerable length) fandom for the Great Ladies is extreme and makes her seem both pitiful and neurotic; these autobiographical excursions are interrupted by Fellman's acting out bits of the biographies and showing us movie clips of their performances.

Somebody ought to send a memo to all solo show performers: 1) If you're a singer, stick to singing and find a playwright to write your material. 2) Don't wear all black and move furniture around pointlessly. 3) Ask yourself why anybody who's not a blood relative would want to hear all that stuff about your hopes and dreams and disappointments. - Toby Zinman

Digital Effects. Personable actor/magician Steve Cuiffo lays his cards on the table - a new deck, just purchased from Rite Aid, he says - and proceeds for about an hour to impress you with tricks that begin with the old standby "choose a card, any card" and build to higher stakes.

He includes the audience - and even someone not there, an audience member's choice of a person called on a cell phone to play along. The tricks are mystifying, which is the point, and Cuiffo's through-line - he's never quite sure he can bring it off, but the audiences knows better - is nicely underplayed. He is charming to the end, when he runs a "magical purifying ritual" - a trick with cards in everyone's hands. - Howard Shapiro