Exit the King

Eugene lonesco once admitted that he was a playwright of despair--otherwise, he said, "why do you think I have to be so funny?" The basic problem with Exit the King is that it is not funny enough to leaven the despair, and what comic spirit there is has been muffled in this Manhattan production by the APA Repertory Company. A 90-minute mood piece on the palpable fear of approaching death, the play has been given a sleepy rather than springy staging by Director Ellis Rabb. Instead of displaying regal authority and a poignant awareness of death, Richard Easton as the king mopes, whines and stumbles about the stage in tattered melancholy, a sort of counterfeit Lear.

The king is told his fate with absurd and explicit clarity at the play's beginning: "You're going to die in an hour and a half. You're going to die at the end of the play." His name is Berenger --lonesco's Everyman, who was the clerk in Rhinoceros, the clown in The Airborne Pedestrian. With typical lonesco chronology, King Berenger is about 400 years old, but his reign seems to span thousands of years. He is credited with inventing the wheelbarrow, designing the airplane, splitting the atom, and writing Shakespeare's plays. Once decked in splendor, his throne room is now crumbling in decay. Once rich and powerful, his kingdom is now poor, famished and depopulated. His erstwhile magnificent army has dwindled to a single guard, and life--the ultimate deserter--is about to flee his court.

All King Berenger learns in his last 90 minutes is an existential truism: one dies alone, with no quarter given and no help available. The only person who begs the king to cling to life is his succulently attractive second wife, young Queen Marie (Patricia Conolly). The pompous court physician is professionally adamant about the exactitude of his countdown to death, and the carping old crone (Eva Le Gallienne) who was the king's first wife adopts a get-on-with-it tone.

Despite its lack of death-defying wit, Exit the King is not unmoving as it records the tender anguish of love for what one is about to lose. Berenger's question, "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?" is a lacerated cry from the heart. Sadly, the bumbling hand of the APA reduces it to an infantile yelp of self-pity.

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