Photos courtesy of the Long Beach Playhouse.

Many theater-goers assume they must be a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre (or at least of existentialism) to enjoy No Exit, which I have never found to be the case. Granted, when considered alongside the renowned French philosopher’s body of work it benefits from the larger context, but removed from it, No Exit remains amusing, thought provoking, and sometimes downright scary all on its own. Perhaps it appears a bit more like a Twilight Zone episode today than it did back in 1944, but it nonetheless remains an important work that rewards revisiting. 

Under the direction of the Long Beach Playhouse’s own Executive and Producing Artistic Director, Andrew Vonderschmitt, No Exit is given a solid, if not trailblazing revival.

The plot of No Exit should be familiar to most theater-goers, philosophy majors, or avid readers as it is considered a classic in those circles. But as this play has something to offer a much broader audience, I will recap some of the premise here:

The play opens on an empty room. Inside, there is a window without a pane or view, an abstract sculpture, a table with a letter opener upon it (hello Chekhov) and three items of miss-matched Victorian furniture that can be sat upon. Upstage there is a single door. Through it walk all four members of the cast, only one of whom will ever be allowed to leave. The Valet that welcomes each of our protagonists to their new home is the one person who is allowed to enter and exit the room. The rest of No Exit’s characters (it seems) are trapped there forever.

We soon learn that this room is not a just a poorly decorated living room, it’s a poorly decorated living room in Hell. We also learn that these three afterlife-long occupants are forced to share this one room due to each one’s inherent ability to cause perpetual unease and frustration in the other two. What follows is a Sisyphean struggle for peace and well-being that stays enough shy of hopelessness for us to anticipate progression. At every chance for this, however, something goes awry.

To keep this plot from becoming tedious and predictable requires an excellent cast with a keen sense of moment-to-moment motivation. It also requires a director who knows how to keep bodies in motion and resist the temptation to allow an overacting scream-fest. While Mr. Vonderschmitt’s vision of Sartre’s world is not unlike variations we have seen before, he is more than up to these difficult tasks and he and his cast create a successful, and well-paced production.

Each member of the cast is good, though some find greater ease at constancy than others. Derek Bulger plays the Valet with ample amounts of creepy and smarmy, relying perhaps a bit too much on the later than the former. Regardless, he sets the tone well for the room’s three inhabitants: Garcin, Inez and Estelle, each of which he leads into their new quarters.

Of the three, Anthony B. Cohen’s Garcin is the most impressive. He inhabits the roll with a sense of realist defeat that grows in its desperation as the play progresses. He delivers all of his famous lines with sincerity and grit and even manages to make his visions of his home life in the upper world believable and earnest.  

Natalie Beisner’s performance as Inez is also excellent. Inez’s character has always seemed to me somehow the most conflicted and outspoken of the three detainees, and Beisner does not disappoint in shedding a light on that conflict. There is a bipolar nature to Inez’s personality that teeters back and fourth from sensible to manic irrationality. Beisner does a good job of finding the middle ground between these two extremes and makes her torture all the more sympathetic and disturbing for it. Her femme fatale looks also suite her character’s tone, though I wish she had been dressed in a darker colored blouse. Inez doesn’t strike me as a person who was very fond of pastels.

Genevieve Simon plays Estelle and though she fits the role physically and brings a great deal of personality, surprising humor, and pathos to Estelle’s superficial character, she lost me a bit during her more dramatic scenes. Estelle’s vision of her life on earth falling apart is perhaps the most difficult and awkwardly written part of the play, but Simon somehow seemed trapped upstage and inside herself throughout this key scene, something I wish could have been remedied.

Mr. Vonderschmitt creates a great feeling of desperation and claustrophobia throughout No Exit and should be commended on never letting the pace drag, or letting things go on too long without a lightening of tone. His staging is traditional, but clear, and he pulls together an intensely theatrical world through the use of very few resources. His decision to ignore any sort of French accents is also appreciated.

The lighting changes and the staging for the characters’ visions of their still living loved ones are inconsistent This is the production’s only real draw back. At first, it seems that the shift to a whiter light comes at the beginning of each of these “visions” and they are staged facing out towards the audience.

As the play progresses however, the lights seem to come on more gradually, and the directions in which the visions occur start to move around the space. This makes it harder for the audience to follow whether the characters are talking to each other in conversation or relaying messages of their old lives back on earth. Some consistency here would have helped make these sometimes awkward scenes less distracting, and would have likely clarified the transitions for some audience members less familiar with the material.

At one point in No Exit Estelle says, “When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.”

There are no mirrors in Satre’s hell.

Here, all three of these characters must prove to be mirrors for one another both literally and figuratively. Other’s opinions of oneself, according to Sartre, feed deeply and perversely into one’s own opinion of themselves. In a place where one is trapped to only know themselves through the eyes of another, we begin to see what Satre may have meant by Garcin’s famous quote from which the title of this review is taken.

Time and again throughout the play, I was reminded of one of my favorite scenes from the film version of Cabaret. In it, three of the film’s main characters are winding down after a long day of picnics, country drives and debauchery, when two of them decide to dance with each other. After a few moments, they invite the third to come and join them. They all form a triangle with their heads almost touching, and start to spin together. Then all of a sudden, the chemistry is thrown off. Things seem to be suddenly awkward and one by one, they start to laugh. I believe it was Bob Fosse who commented on that scene saying it was fine for three people to dance together—until they tried to look each other in the eyes.

In No Exit, all three characters are eternally forced to look each other in the eyes. As audience members, we are admitted for a sampling of this, then graciously returned to our world of windows and doors that open to the outside, and we have the opportunity to open to ourselves. 

The Long Beach Playhouse’s production of No Exit runs through August 23. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For tickets, click here.

{FG_GEOMAP [33.7829014,-118.1351434] FG_GEOMAP}