Skip to main contentEugene Ionesco's play is an absurdist farceur's translation of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' On Death and Dying. Berenger (Ionesco's Everyman and an alter ego), king of a collapsed realm, is dying. But before fading away into the grave he progresses through those famous first four stages--denial, anger, bargaining, depression--before accepting the inevitable. Ionesco, who was quite ill when he wrote the play, described his piece as "an apprenticeship in dying," and Exit the King remains one of the few pieces of modern theater to boldly grapple with the subject.
With their own impressive absurdist approach to theater, the twin engines of Imago, Carol Triffle and Jerry Mouawad, would seem to be the perfect pair to pull off this difficult play: difficult because there exists a fine line to tread between its comedy and pathos. Unfortunately, Triffle and Mouawad fail to realize either. The "comedy" too often is expressed in frenetic, purposeless movement, while the pathos must make do with Mouawad's odd groans of despair as Berenger.
This is a disappointing production because the combination of Ionesco and Imago at first seemed so promising. The play demands a highly stylized approach, something at which Imago excels. Yet here the company seems to have lost itself in the words of the text (never Imago's strong point), never to discover the text's meaning. And so a certain stiffness sets in, creating something creaking and rickety; deadly.
The one intriguing idea of Imago's is to make the setting, the throne room in the king's castle, the production's central metaphor. Ionesco alludes to the connection between the state of the king (who is the state) and the state of the castle, as accompanying his disintegration there's appeared a large crack in the stone wall. Here (to ruin the ending for readers), Berenger's physical demise is joined by the destruction of the castle. Yet like everything else here, it's done in half-measures. Rather than truly making the architecture central to the play's action, as was brilliantly achieved in Imago's House Taken Over, the walls fall down (slowly, grindingly on unoiled pulleys) only at the very final moment.
The performances, too, could stand oiling. Mouawad seems trapped in a griping nasality that first appeared in his ill-conceived The Imaginary Invalid of two years ago. Triffle, as Queen Marguerite, has vocally settled into a catatonic flatness that often works marvelously for underplaying Ionesco's scattered witticisms, but miserably fails at the end to express her character's depth. The other actors--Song Kim as the doctor, Timothy Scarrott as the guard, Amanda Wilkins as Juliette, and Tina Satter as Queen Marie--are amateurish.
Ionesco wrote, "To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying." If Imago would stop to seriously consider what Ionesco has written in response to death's horror, I don't doubt that they would master it.
Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave., 231-9581. 7:30 pm Thursdays, 8 pm Fridays - Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. $21-$24.
Ionesco wrote
in 1962, and it was translated into English the following year.
Manoel de Oliveira's fine film
uses
as its central metaphor.
WWeek 2015