‘Exit the King’ review: Absurdity reigns at A Noise Within

Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” 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.

A doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) has pronounced that he has 90 minutes left to live — not coincidentally the length of the play. And his demented majesty has no intention of going gentle into that good night.

King Berenger the First (Henri Lubatti) has lived for ages under the assumption that it’s his royal prerogative to postpone death indefinitely. When the doctor tells him, “Sire, you are incurable,” he reacts with the same denial that has allowed him to ignore the destruction that has occurred under his negligent leadership.

Ionesco, 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’t 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.

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

Ionesco’s brand of absurdism is indebted to classic French farce, which is redeployed in lunatic fashion to lampoon the nonsensical nature of human existence. In “Exit the King,” he confronts the insupportable reality of death with the same madcap delirium of his better known works, such as “The Bald Soprano,” “The Chairs” and “Rhinoceros.”

In French, the play’s title, “Le Roi se meurt,” is straightforward. “The King Is Dying” is all the plot summary that’s required. “Exit the King,” a common enough stage direction, has the advantage, however, of foregrounding the play’s brazen theatricality. In characteristic Ionesco fashion, the work proceeds through intensification, a steady ratcheting up of the situation, rather than through traditional narrative development.

Berenger, a character who appears in different guises in several of his plays, is Ionesco’s version of Everyman. Here, he is crowned and brandishing a scepter, but the skittishness toward the ultimate reality of life — its unavoidable end — makes him a heightened version of all of us.

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’s not in cahoots with the unnervingly blasé doctor, she’s at least in agreement with the implacable timetable he’s laid out.

Queen Marie (Erika Soto), his enabling second wife, tries to shield the king from the bad news, but she’s no match for Marguerite’s 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.

Berenger won’t 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.

Individually, there’s much daring good work from the actors. Soto’s Marie pouts and squeals with abandon. Vogt’s Juliette groans like a workhorse that knows it’s destined for the glue factory. Berg’s Guard might overdo it with the vociferousness with which he announces every entrance at the court, but overdoing it is Ionesco’s mode.

Lubatti’s Berenger is an old baby, given to tantrums and fits of pique. And only DeMichelle’s 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 Dalí, 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.

The mise en scène is sumptuously prepared with flourishes of rococo drollery. Tesshi Nakagawa’s scenic design is like a toy kingdom that induces the audience into a state of make-believe. Angela Balogh Calin’s costumes prepare the way for Ionesco’s prankish jokes.

But “Exit the King” isn’t easy to reignite. When the play was done on Broadway in 2009, 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’s vision to spontaneously ignite into antic life.