City Garage continues its ongoing exploration of the avant-garde theater with its latest production, Exit the King, by Eugene Ionesco. The 1962 play has been freshened up by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe, the mom and pop behind City Garage. Their new translation (and adaptation) is crisp and colloquial, easy on the ear. And they have mounted the play in equally vibrant fashion. Exit the King deals with mortality. A king called Berenger (Ionesco’s version of Everyman; he turns up in other plays of his) is dying. During his long agony his kingdom shrinks, his people diminish, his cities sink into bottomless chasms, his following thins out, his two wives (the Queens Marguerite and Marie; Natasha St. Clair-Johnson and Lindsay Plake, respectively) abandon him, his palace vanishes, and he himself ultimately disappears. As performed with heart-breaking power by Troy Dunn, The King is vain, confused, self-centered, yet all too human and likable—a man we know all too well, for he is us. He struggles mightily to cling to life, leave a mark on the world, only to finally fizzle out like a shooting star. This isn’t to say Exit the King is all existential gloom; Ionesco is too much of a showman for that; he garnishes his story with humor, slapstick and bawdiness. Anthony M. Sannazzaro plays a quack of a doctor; Kat Johnston, a down-to-earth, lusty maid; David E. Frank a dim-witted guard. Duncombe’s handsome, red-satin set and Josephine Poinsot’s simple yet elegant costumes also add color and flair to the proceedings. As Duncombe points out in a program note, the play is “a piece of dark poetry, an aching celebration of life’s simplest beauties. It urges us to embrace every instant, no matter how banal, of the life we are given.”
