It's Bernie Geldmann's birthday and all he wants is a new frame on the portrait of himself that hangs alongside that of founding partner Beau Maguire. Dysfunction reigns at the firm as the birthday party gives way to all-out farce in this absurdist play about a man who is so arrogant, so insecure, and so petty that, even in death, his law firm partner poses a threat to his outsized ego.

The original absurdists invented stories about vagabonds waiting in a barren landscape; or cripples living atop garbage cans who hate each other, yet need each other to survive; or a king whose kingdom disappears to nothingness. Viewing the circumstances of life as senseless, these writers strove to peel away the masks of conventionality and expose the absurdities of the human condition-and encouraged us to laugh at ourselves in the process.

While Portraits takes place in a modern framework using recognizable surroundings, its characters are just as tragic and confounded as those vagabonds, cripples, and kings, leading us to question our social values and ask who the real winners and losers are as we pass through an existence that none of us understands.