<\/p>\n
Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco\u2019s \u201cExit the King,\u201d now in revival at A Noise Within under the direction of Michael Michetti, revolves around a centuries-old king whose health is in as dire a state as his kingdom.<\/p>\n
A doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) has pronounced that he has 90 minutes left to live \u2014 not coincidentally the length of the play. And his demented majesty has no intention of going gentle into that good night.<\/p>\n
King Berenger the First (Henri Lubatti) has lived for ages under the assumption that it\u2019s his royal prerogative to postpone death indefinitely. When the doctor tells him, \u201cSire, you are incurable,\u201d he reacts with the same denial that has allowed him to ignore the destruction that has occurred under his negligent leadership.<\/p>\n
Ionesco<\/a>, the Romanian-born French playwright, is one of the pillars (along with Samuel Beckett) of the Theatre of the Absurd, a category that theater scholar Martin Esslin formulated to account for a new breed of postwar playwriting. The dramatists he included didn\u2019t have all that much in common on the surface. No one would ever confuse Harold Pinter with Jean Genet, or Beckett with Ionesco for that matter. But they shared an aversion to conventional plot, coherent character psychology and even rational argument.<\/p>\n The existential philosophy of Camus and Sartre, self-evident truths for these absurdist writers, is conveyed less through the content than through the style of their plays. Language is no longer a means of communication but a mark of the unbridgeable distance between human beings<\/p>\n Ionesco\u2019s brand of absurdism<\/a> is indebted to classic French farce, which is redeployed in lunatic fashion to lampoon the nonsensical nature of human existence. In \u201cExit the King,\u201d he confronts the insupportable reality of death with the same madcap delirium of his better known works, such as \u201cThe Bald Soprano,\u201d \u201cThe Chairs\u201d and \u201cRhinoceros.\u201d<\/p>\n In French, the play\u2019s title, \u201cLe Roi se meurt,\u201d is straightforward. \u201cThe King Is Dying\u201d is all the plot summary that\u2019s required. \u201cExit the King,\u201d a common enough stage direction, has the advantage, however, of foregrounding the play\u2019s brazen theatricality. In characteristic Ionesco fashion, the work proceeds through intensification, a steady ratcheting up of the situation, rather than through traditional narrative development.<\/p>\n Berenger, a character who appears in different guises in several of his plays, is Ionesco\u2019s version of Everyman. Here, he is crowned and brandishing a scepter, but the skittishness toward the ultimate reality of life \u2014 its unavoidable end \u2014 makes him a heightened version of all of us.<\/p>\n He is accompanied on his reluctant journey to the finish line with a group of characters who by turns torment and placate him. His chief antagonist is his caustic first wife, Queen Marguerite (Joy DeMichelle), who operates as a kind of a martinet death doula. If she\u2019s not in cahoots with the unnervingly blas\u00e9 doctor, she\u2019s at least in agreement with the implacable timetable he\u2019s laid out.<\/p>\n Queen Marie (Erika Soto), his enabling second wife, tries to shield the king from the bad news, but she\u2019s no match for Marguerite\u2019s imperious bossiness. Juliette (KT Vogt), a disheveled servant exhausted from her penurious life and unceasing labor, and a Guard (Lynn Robert Berg), who continues to stand ludicrously on ceremony despite the apocalyptic turn of events at court, round out the cast of comic grotesques.<\/p>\n Berenger won\u2019t be able to get out of this jam, though deflecting the unwanted is one of his specialties. Watching him childishly try to sneak out of his appointment with death is the name of the game, and Lubatti throws himself headlong into the role in a performance that has him careening across the stage in a series of balletic falls.<\/p>\n Individually, there\u2019s much daring good work from the actors. Soto\u2019s Marie pouts and squeals with abandon. Vogt\u2019s Juliette groans like a workhorse that knows it\u2019s destined for the glue factory. Berg\u2019s Guard might overdo it with the vociferousness with which he announces every entrance at the court, but overdoing it is Ionesco\u2019s mode.<\/p>\n Lubatti\u2019s Berenger is an old baby, given to tantrums and fits of pique. And only DeMichelle\u2019s Marguerite has the necessary command to bring this obstreperous monarch to heel. The characters are like those in a deck of wild cards designed by Salvador Dal\u00ed, but somehow the game Ionesco prepares never takes off here. The clowning might be a little too effortful. The exertion dampens some of the mirth. <\/p>\n The mise en sc\u00e8ne is sumptuously prepared with flourishes of rococo drollery. Tesshi Nakagawa\u2019s scenic design is like a toy kingdom that induces the audience into a state of make-believe. Angela Balogh Calin\u2019s costumes prepare the way for Ionesco\u2019s prankish jokes.<\/p>\n But \u201cExit the King\u201d isn\u2019t easy to reignite. When the play was done on Broadway in 2009<\/a>, director Neil Armfield and a cast led by Geoffrey Rush performed as if in a fever dream. (Rush was rewarded with a Tony for his unbridled extravagance.) Such toppling energy may be necessary for Ionesco\u2019s vision to spontaneously ignite into antic life.<\/p>\n