Show Summary

Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit is the noted existentialist philosopher’s seminal 1944 play, in which three strangers mercilessly exploit one another's fears and weaknesses in a windowless room, their conflict eventually prompting one of them to utter the famous line: "Hell is other people." The first cursed soul to appear is Cradeau, a cowardly, womanizing journalist who collaborated with the Germans in World War II France. He meets his match in the sadistic Inez, a onetime postal clerk who arrives in Hades having destroyed her lesbian lover. Inez is eager to spend the afterlife preying upon the frivolous society woman Estelle, who has a dark secret lurking in her past. With surprising flashes of humor and cruelty, the interpersonal dynamics shift ceaselessly during the course of the play, so that each individual has moments of power and weakness, exhilaration and despair.

What makes No Exit so riveting is the way these three people drop their connections to the living world and face themselves. There are no mirrors in this room because these three are reflections of each other's darkest secrets. And because they see each other so clearly, their self-inflicted pain is constant. By serving as mirrors for each other, they also serve as unrelenting torturers. Here, for unending eternity, the three will reflect to one another the ugly characters they formed during their lives. As terrifying as No Exit may be for them, we the living know that change is always possible. The character is not finished, Sartre tells us, until his or her final choice is made.

Creative Team

Rhianna Basore	Monique Gaffney	Steven Lone	Kevin Morrison

 

Press Photos

Pictured: (l-r) Steven Lone and Kevin Morrison from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.	Pictured: (l-r) Kevin Morrison and Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.
Pictured: (l-r) Kevin Morrison and Rhianna Basore from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.	Pictured: (l-r) Monique Gaffney, Rhianna Basore and Steven Lone from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.
Pictured: (l-r) Monique Gaffney, Steven Lone and Rhianna Basore from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.	Pictured: (l-r) Steven Lone, Monique Gaffney, and Rhianna Basore from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.
Pictured: (l-r) Rhianna Basore, Monique Gaffney and Steven Lone from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.	Pictured: (l-r) Rhianna Basore, Steven Lone and Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.
Pictured: (l-r) Steven Lone, Rhianna Basore and Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.	Pictured: Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Ken Jacques.
Pictured: (l-r) Steven Lone, Rhianna Basore and Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Barron Henzel.	Pictured: Monique Gaffney from No Exit. Photo credit: Barron Henzel.
Pictured: Steven Lone from No Exit. Photo credit: Barron Henzel.	Pictured: Rhianna Basore from No Exit. Photo credit: Barron Henzel.

Press Release

Jean Paul Sartre’s classic fantasy “No Exit” next at Diversionary

Diversionary Theatre’s second production of the 2008-2009 season is Jean Paul Sartre’s classic fantasy No Exit, running September 11-October 5. No Exit is a 1944 existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors"). Diversionary is using the Samuel French published script as adapted from the French by Paul Bowles. Directed by Esther Emery, the cast features Monique Gaffney as Inez, Steven Lone as Cradeau, Rhianna Basore as Estelle and Kevin Morrison as the Bellboy. A classic line from the play is “Hell is other people.”

“We love the surprise of this play,” said Diversionary’s Executive & Artistic Director Dan Kirsch. “While people remember it from studying it in high school or college, most people haven’t read the play in years, and don’t remember that there is a lesbian character. It’s witty, biting and timeless, and we can’t wait to share it with our audiences.” In 1944, the fact that Inez was a lesbian was an extremely controversial point for both audiences and critics alike. Director Emery added that the three main characters “cannot exist without someone else telling them that they are brave or beautiful or cruel.”

Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit is the noted existentialist philosopher’s seminal 1944 play, in which three strangers mercilessly exploit one another's fears and weaknesses in a windowless room, their conflict eventually prompting one of them to utter the famous line: "Hell is other people." The first cursed soul to appear is Cradeau, a cowardly, womanizing journalist who collaborated with the Germans in World War II France. He meets his match in the sadistic Inez, a onetime postal clerk who arrives in Hades having destroyed her lesbian lover. Inez is eager to spend the afterlife preying upon the frivolous society woman Estelle, who has a dark secret lurking in her past. With surprising flashes of humor and cruelty, the interpersonal dynamics shift ceaselessly during the course of the play, so that each individual has moments of power and weakness, exhilaration and despair.

Wikipedia lists more than a dozen references to the use of the play in popular culture, including in the television programs Gossip Girl, Supernatural, The West Wing, CSI and The 4400, and in the films Beetlejuice and Friday the 13th Part VI.

Esther Emery directed Diversionary’s production of Bunbury in May 2007, and just directed Sight Unseen at The Old Globe Theatre. In January, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle named Emery the inaugural recipient of the Jack O'Brien Excellence in Directing Award. Monique Gaffney recently appeared at Diversionary in Bluebonnet Court, and just finished ion Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Steven recently appeared in Moxie Theatre’s The Listener and earlier this year in ion Theatre’s Punks. Rhianna has appeared in Romeo and Juliet at North Coast Rep and in Rapechild at Sledgehammer Theatre. Kevin is a student at SDSU, majoring in Theatre with an emphasis in performance.

Sartre is one of those writers for whom a determined philosophical position is the centre of their artistic being. Although drawn from many sources, the existentialism Sartre formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity and that of its author reached a climax in the forties, and Sartre's theoretical writings as well as his novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature. In his philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the "loss of God" is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man's life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the "solidarity" of others.

What makes No Exit so riveting is the way these three people drop their connections to the living world and face themselves. There are no mirrors in this room because these three are reflections of each other's darkest secrets. And because they see each other so clearly, their self-inflicted pain is constant. By serving as mirrors for each other, they also serve as unrelenting torturers. Here, for unending eternity, the three will reflect to one another the ugly characters they formed during their lives. As terrifying as No Exit may be for them, we the living know that change is always possible. The character is not finished, Sartre tells us, until his or her final choice is made.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website: “"existentialism" is a term that belongs to intellectual history. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates, existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. The postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belongs to the club; Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliche, parodied in countless books and films by Woody Allen.”

Started in 1986, the mission of Diversionary Theatre is to produce plays with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes that portray characters in their complexity and diversity both historically and contemporarily.

No Exit will preview on September 11 and 12, and open on Saturday, September 13 and run through Sunday, October 5. Performance times are: Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday & Saturday at 8:00pm, Sunday at 2:00 & 7:00pm, and a Monday, September 22 performance at 7:30pm. Single tickets are now on sale. For information, call the Diversionary box office at 619.220.0097 or log on to www.diversionary.org.

Financial support for Diversionary Theatre is provided in part by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

Reviews

SAN DIEGO THEATRE SCENE
"CURTAIN CALLS" #256
By Pat Launer
www.sdtheatrescene.com
09/18/08

Hellfire

THE SHOW: No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 seminal, existential play; originally published in French as Huis Clos (‘behind closed doors’). This is the translation/adaptation by Paul Bowles. The play was controversial when it was published (and not only because there was a lesbian character) and it remains provocative today.

THE STORY: “Hell is other people.” That’s the premise and the story. As each of three individuals is led into an attractive but sparsely appointed and windowless drawing-room, we learn that they’re damned souls, recently deceased (in fairly unsavory ways), and we watch as their ability to view ‘the other side’ diminishes and disappears. They come expecting fire, whips, thumbscrews, torturers. But they soon realize they’re doomed to eternity with each other, each the brutally honest mirror and emotional tormentor of the others, each preying on the others’ fears and foibles, refusing to be, say or do what the others most need. There’s no need for mirrors when your companions are reflections of your worst nightmares and darkest secrets, and they’re unwilling to perpetuate the illusions of self you created in life. In the final analysis, Sartre is saying, who we are is the sum total of all our actions. While we’re alive, there’s still the possibility of choice and change. For these three, it’s way too late.

Brutal. Disquieting. And still powerful.

Structurally, there’s a kind of genius to the play, with its multiple levels of scrutiny: characters are pretending to be something they’re not; actors are pretending to be those characters. The characters’ seek out mirrors to avoid the judgmental gaze of their companions; and their attempts to fool their observers are carried out under the gaze of the play’s spectators.

THE PLAYERS/THE PRODUCTION: The Diversionary production is very strong. Esther Emery’s direction shows a firm grasp on the characters, though they don’t change over time quite as one might like, as they gradually strip away the masks and artifice, and reveal the distasteful characteristics that landed them in this hell to begin with. Still, the performances are all potent and convincing. Kevin Morrison maintains a Cheshire-cat smile as the Bellboy who knows all, tells little. Steven Lone is Cradeau (a name that appears as Garcin in other productions), a ruthless journalist, a womanizer who ‘s obsessed by bravery and honor, but is truly a coward. His performance is wonderful, very ‘30s noir, a tough cookie who inevitably crumbles. Rhianna Basore, looking delectable in stylized blonde wig and ruby lips, is the flirtatious manipulator propelled by lust and vanity. With her prissy ways and batting eyelashes, Basore is a delight, but there’s a black heart beneath her beautiful surface. The fulcrum between these two is Inez, a cold, calculating, ruthless lesbian who’ll do anything to get Estelle to be interested in her. But Estelle is only interested in a man, and Cradeau is only interested in himself. Inez is one of Monique Gaffney’s most potent characterizations; she’s icy, smart, crisp, incisive, merciless. The three play off each other superbly. Each character is finely etched; together they create a spine-chilling triangle.

The set (Jungah Han) is sleek and elegant, a gray monochrome of endless stripes and squares, glaringly lit (Jason Bieber). The costumes are outstanding: era- and character defining. It all fits together perfectly. 90 minutes of (delicious, dramatic) hell.

THE LOCATION: Diversionary Theatre, through October 5

'NOT TO BE MISSED!' (Pat’s Picks)
No Exit – 64 years after it premiered, still packs a wallop; excellently executed. Diversionary Theatre, through 10/5

---

San Diego Reader
Three Damned Characters
By Jeff Smith
September 24, 2008

Picture hell. For those who live in Pacific Beach and work nine-to-five jobs, hell arrives every Thursday afternoon. College students schedule their classes Monday through Thursday. Come that afternoon, especially in the “Kill Zone” around Mission Boulevard, music gets loud. Then choruses of popped tops and cries of “yaaaaa, dude!” herald yet another four-day blow.

PB hell is cyclical. The forever-after variety comes from the Bible via Dante’s Inferno: crackling flames, impish demons prodding pitchforks, flaming lakes, the damned screaming as if all the prisons in the world let out an everlasting howl.

In No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre envisioned a hell without God. His characters sin and are punished, but the torments aren’t medieval horrors. In fact, compared to Hades, Sheol, the underworld, or Dante, Sartre’s hell looks downright doable, at first.

It’s a drawing room furnished in the Second French Empire style: a chair and two divans, a marble statue on the mantel. The colors clash, especially the red and spinach-green divans, but that seems minor. The building’s like a hotel. It has at least three stories and many rooms, even a valet — some sort of minimum-security hell, you imagine, as if whatever power sends people here is soft on sin.

For Diversionary Theatre, scenic designer Jungah Han papers the walls, window, and fireplace with garish, white and grayish-beige stripes. Even these don’t look so bad until you realize that Sartre’s people will see them for all time. And they will never sleep. And will always have their eyes open. And must be together 24/7. Then the stripes become bars and the room a cage from which there is no exit.

Sartre believed that existence has no Creator, no predetermined plan (“everything that exists is born for no reason”). Because of that, we are “condemned to be free.” We must make choices authentic to our being: “live our own words, speak our own actions.” The opinions of others, which try to stick to us like glue, should never define us. If we let them, then we are no longer “real.”

No Exit premiered a month before D-Day. Germany occupied France and, if Nazi rhetoric were true, would for another thousand years. The times became a stern test for followers of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. Given German tanks in the streets and swastikas everywhere, abandoning one’s inner self to the oppressor, even temporarily, may have seemed a reasonable temptation. But for Sartre, who detested limits and authority, there are no second chances. His three damned characters in No Exit gave up their right to choose. And when they abandoned the power to define their future, they were damned to hell.

Cradeau, a pacifist journalist; Inez, a postal clerk; and Estelle, a young society woman, don’t resemble candidates for fire and brimstone. They admit to wrongdoing, some: Cradeau was executed for his antiwar beliefs, he says; Estelle’s foggy about causes, but there was a mysterious death in her past. Inez, however, sees through their social guises. Cradeau’s a coward, Estelle’s a murderer, and Inez admits she needs to “see people suffer to exist at all.” This room is no mistake, she says. Everything’s been planned, down to the clashing colors. This place is real, she says, because we haven’t been.

They call death “absence.” The euphemism is apt because they abandoned their authentic beings and need the opinions of others for self-validation.

As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that even if there is no divine plan in Sartre’s universe, whoever designed this room, this hell, did so in minute detail: everything’s tailored for these particular inhabitants, tailored for friction (but if nothing is preplanned, Mr. Sartre, and if there is no omniscient deity, what sort of afterlife designer could do that?). Once Cradeau, Inez, and Estelle learn the other’s faults, however, they use them like negative reflections to assault their cellmates. And the windowless, mirrorless room becomes a menage a monsters.

The Diversionary production makes a game go with difficult material. Director Esther Emery treats the play as a period piece. Jennifer Brawn Gittings’s telling costumes evoke spring 1944 — as does Estelle’s blond wig, with twin cornucopias over her eyebrows.

The acting style’s mid-’40s as well. Steven Lone’s Cradeau displays a slick leading-man appeal; Rhianna Basore’s Estelle, ingenue naivete; Monique Gaffney’s Inez, an arch toughness (and Bette Davis eyes). They begin as if in a movie from the period, playing prescribed roles. These are the people they wanted to be like. Then, like wax melting in extreme heat, hell slowly peels away veneers. Cradeau, Inez, and Estelle become not themselves but what Sartre called “the Other,” which is everyone outside an authentic self. Cradeau utters the famous line, “Hell is other people” (“L’enfer, c’est les autres”). But this doesn’t mean it’s you hounded by everyone else. In Sartre’s hell, you don’t exist at all: you are merely other people against other people.

---

San Diego City Beat
Down to earth
Set design is a character in Diversionary’s very good No Exit
By Martin Jones Westlin
September 23, 2008

Satan has the cushiest job in the universe. He’s also an equal-opportunity recruiter. Gays, straights, men, women, Nazi sympathizers, postal workers, airheads, journalists (especially journalists) and pretty much everybody else: All occupy about the same place on his radar, because all are way too eager to jump, and viciously so, on each other’s frailties and flaws. The Big S has only to sit back and watch the others do the grunt work as they decimate in the lower realms what lives they couldn’t obliterate on Earth.

No wonder, then, that “Hell is other people” stands as the most famous tagline from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, the current Diversionary Theatre entry. We’re the sum total of our choices, the play says, and those choices are made of our own free wills; one way or the other, we must account for them at the end of our days. Sartre’s three characters will spend eternity together in Hades doing just that among themselves, and the feedback is as loathsome as the lives they led. Director Esther Emery recognizes that they in fact can’t exist without each other’s contempt—she’s coaxed some wonderful work here as each character keeps coming back for more.

First up is Cradeau (Steven Lone), a spineless excuse for a reporter who sold out his country and aided the Nazis during World War II’s French occupation. He’s quickly joined by Inez (Monique Gaffney), a former postal clerk who in life routinely tormented her lesbian lover, and Estelle (Rihanna Basore), a ditzoid bourgeoisie who offed her bastard child. Inez is all too eager to take up with Estelle even as Cradeau responds to Estelle’s advances; the resulting sexual tension fuels the trio’s mutual ire, and hell becomes yet another venue for the characters’ hatred and suspicion. The difference is that this hell never ends, as underscored by the toothy, sadistic smile on the face of the Bellboy (Kevin Morrison).

That hatred and suspicion is writ large against Jungah Han’s imposing set, a mirrorless and windowless hotel room that locks from the outside. Soft blue walls stare ahead under Jason Bieber’s unerring lights, placidly sitting in judgment as the characters thrust and parry in their calculated attempts to get the best of each other. At one point, the door opens upon Cradeau’s frantic insistence, but none of the principals dare moves from the room. As painful as the past may be, it’s a known quantity; these three are content to weather the eternal storm inside. Therein lies the tragedy, whether in this world or the next.

This play is an odd choice for gay-oriented Diversionary, as Inez’s lesbianism is merely a circumstance of her evil and not the thrust of the story. It’s almost as if the company’s latched onto this secondary feature as an excuse for doing the play. Nonetheless, Emery and her designers have crafted an excellent piece of theater. The handsome set and players fly in the face of Sartre’s lofty philosophy—the contrast invites insight into some aspects of our beings we’d just as soon ignore.

This review is based on the evening performance of Sept. 14. No Exit runs through Oct. 5 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd., University Heights. $25-$33. 619-220-0097 or www.diversionary.org.