Word: lonesco
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...three offerings thus far this season: Pantagleize, a fantastic farce by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode; Exit the King, lonesco's stark philosophical play about death; and The Show Off, George Kelly's soft-spoken domestic drama of 1924. They make a bright dramatic palette...
...play is immensely theatrical, sensuous and intellectual. Apart from being Pirandello's greatest work, Henry IV is a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd-the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerrilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in lonesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In a towering display of the actor's craft, Kenneth Haigh confers unbrooked, unhinged regality on the title character while coiling...
EXIT THE KING is a stark play about death, rich in poetry and insight. Unfortunately, as interpreted by members of the APA, King has too much of a whine and too little command to involve the audience in lonesco's tragic vision or in his character's emotional tumult...
...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...
...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...