I like to praise Los Angeles live theatre as being huge, diverse, brave, and very high quality.
My opinion holds in part because last week I saw the premiere of Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco at A Noise Within. Not only is this an excellent production of a difficult play, it is the second such I've seen in this city in the last decade! Both also took startlingly different/wonderful directions as well!
This version, done with kind of spectacular sets, lights, costume design this company's budget can afford, has at its heart a very talented and focused cast. Such a combination manages to hit an startling number of targets available in this play. For example, it remains genuinely funny, amid a lot of slapstick and silliness.
King Bérenger the First (Henri Lubatti) is the title character, monarch of a land in a massive, in fact impossible state of decline. The borders have shrunk, the water stopped being drinkable, the citizenry are few, far between, and all feeble-minded. Not only that, the sun burns less bright and sounds grow less loud!
Young Queen Marie (Erika Soto) refuses to believe one word of this. She insists the kingdom and king himself remain a vital as ever, even as the latter can barely stand without help. His Majesty agrees with her, even as Queen Marguerite (Joy DeMichelle) and the Doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) insist on the truth. The King is dying. In fact, he has maybe ninety minutes left. Give or take. Until the curtain, anyway. Against the backdrop of all this, Juliette the maid/cook/scullery/seamstress et al (KT Vogt) and the Guard (Lynn Robert Berg) try to make sense of this all. Juliette's life is horrible, tough, full of back-breaking labor and no joy. The Guard recalls the glories--and yes, the atrocities--of the King's fantastical, horrible, and frankly unbelievable past (including his invention of the airplane). Mostly, though, the King struggles with increasing desperation and decreasing ability to understand his inevitable End.
Now, this is widely regarded as an example of the theatre of the absurd. Yet we feel for the characters. Recognize their own pain, their sometimes courage, as well as periodic terror and/or heroic efforts to hold back the night.
Is this what is absurd? Yes. So too every word spoken by each character, half of which make no sense, most of the others consist of brave or foolish (sometimes both) efforts to face DEATH. Because words remain imperfect tools at their very best, at their most moving, most beautiful. What about the ones who accept this looming doom? Are they absurd? Of course! Just as the King himself, as he sinks into darkness against his will, struggling with shrinking awareness and power to somehow do what we all think we would do--refuse to give up, to surrender, to rage against the dying of the light. He too is absurd.
For that matter, isn't it absurd we watch and hear all this, feeling for people who do not exist, could not exist, and who in the end do not really die? Not yet, anyway.
Not the mention the cast, the playwright, the director (Michael Michetti) and all the wonderful artists who fashioned this performance...!
Absurd how all this pretending about nothing real, somehow also reminds us both of the absurdity of it all--and also makes us feel exactly what these fake people would feel if only they existed.
Just as if we existed.
Exit The King has performances Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7: 30 p.m. as well as Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. until May 31, 2026 at A Noise Within, 3352 E Foothill Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91107.
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