When I think back on the one college class that best prepared me for a career as an arts journalist, I’d have say “Introduction to the Theater of the Absurd.”

When you dedicate yourself to covering the arts in an industry most concerned with news, celebrity and sports, it’s best to embrace the absurdity of your situation. (But really, that’s probably good advice for any career person.)

Coined by theater critic Martin Esslin, the term “Theater of the Absurd” traditionally applies to plays written mostly during the ’40s through ’60s by some of the world’s most provocative playwrights: Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and even Edward Albee.  (Albee did write a play about a middle-class man who falls in love with a goat.)

Stuck in an impossible situation, which no one else seems to find unreasonable, the protagonist in an absurdist play struggles as best he can. Or sometimes, the protagonist thinks he’s normal, and everybody else is crazy.

My personal favorite was always Ionesco, best-known for “The Bald Soprano” and especially for “Rhinoceros,” in which a mysterious epidemic randomly transforms humans into rhinos. That poses an interesting problem. When everybody is doing it, do you just go ahead and become a rhinoceros?

This weekend, a few of Sonoma County’s most consistently daring theater people will open a new production of Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” about an elderly couple that entertains imaginary guests, at the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre.

“The Chairs” co-stars Elizabeth Fuller and Eliot Fintushel, directed David Lear, the consistently inventive director and set designer who staged Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with punk and Goth touches last summer in Sebastopol.

The show runs weekends, except Easter Sunday, through April 11 at 52 W. Sixth Street, Santa Rosa. Tickets: $17-$22. Information: 523-4185, www.6thstreetplayhouse.com.