Ralph Cole Jr., Joy DeMichelle, Henri Lubatti and Lynn Robert Berg (Photo by Craig Schwartz)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
A Noise Within
Through May 31
Henry Lubatti and Joy DeMichelle (Photo by Craig Schwartz)
Sometimes a scenic design, or some aspect of it, can convey as much about the theme of a theater piece as any spoken or written word. In Exit the King, directed by Michael Michetti at A Noise Within, it’s designer Tesshi Nakagawa’s tongue-in-cheek placement of a green neon exit sign high up and pivotal to the set that serves as harbinger to the play’s wry, chillingly mordant message.
Playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote Exit the King in the early 1960s, reportedly over a 20 day period while he was suffering a severe liver ailment and feared for his life. The play was conceived, according to the playwright himself, as a tool to help people deal with death. He referred to it at one point as “an attempt at an apprenticeship at dying,” a description appropriated by translator Donald Watson as a preface to his text.
Exit the King spins a fable about a 400-year-old, once-all-powerful ruler who is now nearing death. So great were his powers at one time that this king was able to control not only the lives of his subjects, whom he sometimes beheaded willy-nilly, but the forces of nature, including the Sun itself.
But the days of storied omnipotence have long passed. All the rich resources that were at the king’s command have been profligately spent. The land has gone fallow and the population has fled, leaving only a few hundred elderly denizens who are quickly dying off.
And now so is the king. When we meet this whiny self-absorbed monarch (Henry Lubatti), he is having a bad day, suffering multiple aches and pains and struggling to walk. What he hasn’t yet realized is that this day is indeed his last, according to his doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) and his first wife Marguerite, (Joy DeMichelle) both of whom repeatedly inform the defiant invalid that he is deathly ill and has perhaps an hour and a half to live. This the king refuses to accept, and he’s bolstered in his denial by his second wife Marie, a goose of a woman garbed in a frilly pink tutu (costumes by Angela Balogh Calin), whom he adores and whose own raison d’etre is to live basked in this adoration. His self-image as a commanding sovereign also continues to be supported by his longtime domestic servant Juliette (KT Voight) and the palace guard (a crisp, standout cameo by Lynn Robert Berg), whose job is to sententiously announce the comings and goings of the royal personages and other non-events that transpire — and does so until they become even too insignificant to note.
The play’s denouement — like that of the individual human life — is never in doubt. Instead, the play functions as a huge distorted mirror, similar to those in a carnival fun house, reflecting back on us the many ways we seek to deny or escape our own demise (anger, petulance, a plea for mercy, an insistence we’ll prove the exception, and so on). And while the human confrontation with death is the front and central theme, the playwright’s reflections on the abuse of power — Ionesco’s own estranged, despised father was an authoritarian and a fascist — are painfully relevant as each day we observe the progressively more maddened and infantile Trump dismantle our country and everything that it once (ideally, at least) stood for.
Under Michetti’s direction, the ensemble works adroitly in service of the playwright’s intent, especially Lubatti in a physically demanding role. But in the end it’s the production values (including Robert A. Sayeg’s spare but judicious lighting and Robert Gardener’s eclectic sound) rather than any wow factor in the performances that leave a lasting impression. It’s in the final moments, when kingdom’s shabby palatial hall transforms to a cavernous cosmic space, that the message of the playwright is powerfully brought home.
A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru May 31. anoisewithin.org Running time: approximately 95 minutes with no intermission.
