Ionesco’s ‘Exit the King’ @ Undermain Theatre
Photos by Paul Semrad
—Martha Heimberg
We take our seats in Undermain Theatre’s basement space, and the stage begins to fill with characters, outfitted in Ava Roberts-Kamaria’s witty, detailed costumes. They scurry madly around a crumbling palace throne room held up by cracked concrete columns in Robert Winn’s haunting, cavernous set design—anchored, of course, by a worn throne. A distraught maid trips over a queen’s ridiculously lengthy royal train, and a knight in creaking armor lurches around the hall, screaming for Alexa to turn up the heat.
And all denial breaks loose.
Surviving members of a ragtag court are gathered to tell their 400-year-old narcissistic king that, despite his hoard of excuses, he is dying along with his silly little kingdom. This is Eugene Ionesco’s famed Absurdist drama Exit the King, in a riveting production based on a translation by Donald Watson. Tim Johnson directs a remarkable cast with a jarring mix of grotesque humor, desperate slapstick, various volumes of guffaws and plaintive sighs—all shrinking to meaningless patter as we watch a self-deluded king forced to confront the reality of human mortality.
Bruce DuBose, Undermain’s producing/artistic director, is a hilariously decaying King Berenger the First: puffed up, cocky, insisting he’s fit as can be at the outset—then finally embodying with piteous vulnerability the inevitable human experience of death. Entering the theater, we catch a glimpse of the vain old king applying rouge to his chalky, wrinkled face in a dressing room near the entrance. He shuffles barefoot toward the throne, an oversized red cloak draped over his blue satin pajamas, grasping his scepter like a cane. He falls once, twice, and crawls painfully to his feet, denying all evidence that the end is near. “I will make the kingdom great again.” Oh, no. Not that weary old slogan.
Berenger’s first wife Queen Marguerite (a calmly determined Rhonda Boutte, wearing a purple gown and a forbidding scowl), doesn’t beat around the throne. Others may try gently to convince or console him, but thick-skinned Marguerite sticks to plain talk: “You are going to die in an hour and half; you are going to die at the end of the play.”
You heard it from the old cow’s mouth, as the king calls Marguerite’s relentless voice of reality. “I will die when I feel like it,” he replies, claiming he’s been “too busy running the kingdom” to take care of himself. Uh-huh. Increasingly, however, we recognize the king’s dilemma as that of all of us—so caught up in the busy, mindless routine or our daily lives that we can’t imagine just stopping. Who would take care of things? Neither, in our packed schedules, do we take time to absorb the astonishing reality of the planet we inhabit.
Berenger’s second wife, Queen Marie (a sweetly seductive Lauren LeBlanc) celebrates their anniversary four times a year; she’s into positive thinking and wellness routines. In one hilariously touching scene, she kneels beside her wobbling husband, takes his hands, and implores him to breathe deeply. “I don’t understand,” he replies. When the egomaniac king looks into the limpid eyes of his pretty queen, all he sees is his own reflection, as all trophy brides must know.
Karren Parrish is all over the palace as Juliette—nurse, housekeeper, cook, and general labor pool—explaining in an Irish brogue to her insanely condescending boss that she endures a lot of misery in her work. The spoiled king will never know the grueling pain of her labors, but babbles as if he knows just what she feels.
The king’s confused but very loyal Guard (a delightfully addled Dennis Raveneau in thin armor, channeling both Don Quixote and the Tin Man) runs through the ragged palace shouting out that his majesty will be famous forever—for just about everything that ever happened. Naïve and exuberant, the Guard claims the king wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and invented the plough and dynamite. He even invented electric cars, according to his biggest fan—a bid for immortality, if I ever heard one.
Jim Jorgensen is creepy and funny, taking on the mannerisms of expert bossiness as The Doctor, Surgeon, Executioner, Bacteriologist and Astrologer. He rubs his hands together with practiced authority as he reminds the king there’s no use yelling for help: the world’s falling apart too, keeping pace with the king’s decline. No way, he reports, to lock up a couple of rebels; the tower is crumbling, the sun is off course and “the Milky Way is curdling.” Crying “alas” doesn’t begin to cover it in this kingdom.
As last moments tick by, the stage begins to empty of the court members. We see videos of their faces projected on the palace columns (design by Rob Menzel), bodiless ghosts whose image remains in the dying king’s mind. Only Marguerite stands by to the end, as Dubose’s Berenger, makeup long since removed, collapses on the throne. A loud heartbeat echoes through the empty halls, and lights flicker. Paul Semrad designed the show’s sound, and Steve Woods its lighting, creating an atmosphere of dark finality as the king slowly, inevitably loosens his grip on life.
And the world ends, or so it seems to him.
How Absurd he is to think it. How self-centered. How…human.
WHEN: November 1-24, 2024
WHERE: 3200 Main Street, Dallas
WEB: undermain.org
