Enter, Stage Right: Mr. Majesty, The State of Our Dis-Union is ABSURD

EXIT THE KING: Theater Review

Shakespeare acutely observed in As You Like It that “All the world’s a stage.” If so, what manner of production is being played out now by the Trump regime? On May 11’s The View sharp tongued commentator Ana Navarro likened the administration to “a reality show.” But with the mounting of Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco’s 1962 Exit the King, I think that A Noise Within, one of L.A.’s top theatre companies, has actually hit the nail right on the head.

Exit the King depicts the demise of King Berenger the First (the forlorn, farcical Henri Lubatti) and his diminished reign and realm. Set at Berenger’s court inside of a rundown castle that has seen better days (impressive scenic design by Tesshi Kakagawa), the not-so-majestic majesty is attended by his two wives. As wife number two, the youthful, sensuous Queen Marie (Erika Soto), costumed like a demented ballerina with a tiara, seems more to play the role of a mistress, while Queen Marguerite (Joy DeMichelle) has a regal, imperious bearing as she performs the duties pertaining to a monarch’s wife.

King Berenger’s retinue includes the scheming Doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) and the palace Guard (Lynn Robert Berg), who is also a herald pretentiously proclaiming portentous comings and goings and events. The much put upon Juliette (K.T. Vogt, whose credits include the 1990s sitcom The Tom Show) is not only the King’s nurse, but also the domestic servant of their majesties. Throughout this 90-ish minute one-acter performed sans intermission – with the possible exception of Queen Marguerite who generally retains her royal composure – the characters behave in buffoonish, illogical ways with no rhyme or reason.

ANW recently presented the Bard’s Richard III, which dramatizes the MAGA-vellian machinations and power plays that today are trademarks of the ruthless, inept Trump clique. But with Exit the King, ANW is slyly, wryly taking its critique of Washington’s power elite to a clever new level. For if all the world is indeed a stage, then the show that is unfolding before our eyes is surely very much in the mode of the Theatre of the Absurd.

In his pivotal 1960 essay on that theatrical genre, Hungarian-born critic Martin Esslin explained that these postwar “anti-plays”: “confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention… The laws of probability as well as those of physics are suspended… As a result, it is often unclear whether the action is meant to represent a dream world of nightmares or real happenings… Above all, everything that happens seems to be beyond rational motivation, happening at random or through the demented caprice of an unaccountable idiot fate…”

Henri Lubatti • KT Vogt, Erika Soto, and Henri Lubatti

“This common denominator that characterizes their works might well be described as the element of the absurd. ‘Est absurde ce qui n’a pas de but.. .’ (‘Absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective’), the definition given by Ionesco in a note on Kafka, certainly applies to the plays of Beckett and Ionesco as well as those of Arthur Adamov,” wrote Esslin.

I doubt that Ionesco (Rhinoceros), Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Adamov (The Politics of Rubbish), Jarry (Ubu Roi), Sartre (No Exit), Genet (The Balcony), Pinter (The Lover), Dürrenmatt (whose The Physicists opens this Saturday at The Actors’ Gang’s theater) combined, with Ian Fleming tossed in for good measure to create Bond villains, could collectively ever have conjured up cockamamie characters as absurd as Trump and his coterie.

If you follow the social discourse, from late night comics to serious pundits of the commentariat, from Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert to MS Now’s Lawrence O’Donnell and KPFK’s Ian Masters, it is commonplace to question The Donald’s mental competence, grasp of reality and sanity. Trump is clearly a malevolent, mentally ill imbecile. Consider this, what absurdist dramatist could ever come up with these irrational storylines:

Trump’s predecessor spent more than a year painstakingly, patiently negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an international agreement that limited the Republic of Iran’s nuclear program. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the deal is working, Trump pulls out of the JCPOA, and eventually goes on to assault Iran not once, but twice, in less than a year, despite the fact that the U.S. was in the process of negotiating with the Islamic Republic – which had not attacked America – both times, and despite the fact that Trump vociferously had insisted that the first round of bombing had totally “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear project.

Or consider that during a worldwide pandemic (which Trump bungled, resulting in the deaths of hundred of thousands of Americans) Trump pulled out of the World Health Organization? Or that as the climate emergency threatened to destroy the planet with endless disasters, Trump derides climate change as a “hoax” and pulls out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, under which 1995’s Kyoto Protocol and 2015’s Paris Agreement had been negotiated.

No playwright could ever have the imagination to make this stuff up. If cinéma vérité filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Jean Rouch or the Maysles Brothers had cameras inside of the Trump White House (that is, what’s left of it), their fly on the wall footage would likely reveal lunacy akin to that of Exit the King’s court. I’m sure that what we see in public is tame in comparison to what transpires behind closed doors. In comparison to the blithering idiot Trump, King Berenger is an Albert Einstein.

Exit’s ensemble is excellently, expertly helmed by Michael Michetti, an ANW stalwart. As the cunning, calculating, manipulative Doctor, Ralph Cole Jr. suggested a malicious cross between Goebbels and Stephen Miller with hair. According to wig/makeup designer Tony Valdés, this is how Cole Jr.’s wild and woolly coiffure with a Bride of Frankenstein vibe was created: “We used his own aesthetic and style to create the look of the Doctor. All the base is his own hair, we just added some extensions on his own texture, but curly at the ends to give the look of springs coming out of his head/mind to give the impression of madness and a little bit craziness. We didn't want to extend it all in the same texture so he wouldn’t have a big afro that could look ’70s disco and loose the atemporal look of the play,” which could be taking place during medieval times or today.

Amidst the madness and dark humor, Berg’s herald injects some comic relief as a kind of Middle Ages version of a 24/7 news network. Doing double duty as nurse and servant, K.T. Vogt’s Juliette, the hardest working character in the kingdom, represents the common people, the salt of the Earth. When she tells King Berenger of her toils and woes, he is completely inattentive and lacking in empathy, unable while perched upon his throne of privilege to comprehend her problems. You know, like the masses of Americans suffering from high prices (you know, the costs conman Trump vowed to lower during his presidential campaign), whose load Trump made heavier with tariffs, then compounded by a completely unnecessary war of choice (his, not ours because we don’t live in a democracy, in case you never noticed) which results in spiking the price of gas. Really, what playwright could ever make this stuff up?

If the proletarian Juliette is the most sympathetic character, as Queen Marguerite Joy DeMichelle maintains her monarchical demeanor throughout all the irrational mayhem, probably the only one of the dramatis personae who never loses her cool. DeMichelle also has one of these lovely, photogenic visages that is, well, a sheer joy to behold.

Exit the King is full of physical comedy (which Lubatti in particular excels at as the stricken king clinging to his throne), as well as satire that would make Swift smile or Chaplin giggle. The costuming and lighting by, respectively, designers Angela Balogh Calin and Jared A. Sayeg, enhance the zany onstage antics. At times, Nakagawa’s set seems to coming apart at the seams, in this unseemly seamy dark comedy.

Henry Lubatti, Joy DeMichelle • KT Vogt, Erika Soto,and Henri Lubatti

This is only the second Ionesco play I’ve ever seen – the first was a likewise topnotch production of Rhinoceros at Pacific Resident Theatre, directed by one of L.A.’s top helmers, Guillermo Cienfuegos, who BTW attended ANW’s Exit premiere. The sensibility of Ionesco should be preserved like a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the new Romanian movie Catane by Ioana Mischie, which just opened SEEFest, is in Ionesco’s absurdist tradition.

Who knows how America’s Exit the King will transpire and when? To be sure, Trump is old and seems unhealthy – he even publicly falls asleep when people are verbally fellating him with flattery at cabinet meetings, so this most unnatural of creatures may yet die a natural death. But he is arguably the most despised being on this planet and not even Ionesco, Beckett, Jarry and their cohorts could concoct how this wannabe king will exit the scene. That final chapter remains to be written, but one thing’s for sure: For the sake of humanity, the sooner the better, deliver the letter.

A Noise Within presents Exit the King on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., with 2:00 p.m. matinees on Saturdays and Sundays through May 31. Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Friday and on Sunday, May 17. ANW is at 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. For info and tickets: ANW; (626)356-3100. Free parking is in an adjacent garage.

The fourth book co-authored by Ed Rampell and Luis Reyes about filmmaking in Hawaii drops in August:https://mutualpublishing.com/product/on-location-in-hawaii/.