Tonight I saw "No Exit", the play by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. It was playing at the Side Project Theater in Rogers Park, as was performed by the LiveWire Theater Chicago troup. The Side Project Theater has received nothing but rave reviews for its highly intense format and venue. The theater focuses exclusively on plays which deal with stark human issues and tensions, and for that reason "No Exit" was an excellent addition to their 2006-2007 season. The venue itself is incredibly small, seating only 30. The front row, which is where I sat, puts the audience less than 5 feet away from the actors, who perform on the same level as those seated (viz., there is no elevated "stage"). Thus if the actors are good (which they were), it all makes from a very dramatic and absorbing experience.
The production is directed by Christopher Dennis. The cast is comprised of Don Hall as Garcin, Saren Nofs-Snyder as Inez, Danielle O'Farrell as Estelle, and Jeremiah Musgrove as the Valet. Although all the cast was excellent, particularly Don Hall, it is without doubt that Saren Nofs-Snyder's wholly convincing and piercing depiction of Inez holds the entire play's intensity together.
Sartre's "No Exit" is set in Hell, depicted as an exitless Hotel of sorts, each barren room of which is assigned to the damned. The entire set of the play is confined to one of these rooms and involves the intense interactions between its three occupants, each of whom hold rather dark secrets regarding the reasons they ended up in Hell. But it is not the secrets that drive the dialogue, but rather how each of the three is tormented by the other two in what they discover to be their diabolically orchestrated placement together. This results in the play's most famous line: "Hell is other people".
From what I know of existentialism through the writings of Sartre and Camus, I understand Sartre's Hell to be a metaphor for simple, daily human existence. It is a powerful metaphor, since everyone (particularly those in a Western audience) easily grasps the finality and hopelessness of the notion of Hell, as well as the expectation that those therein have done something to deserve it. But Sartre was no theist and certainly did not believe is such a literal notion of Hell. His implied (indeed explicit) message is that the greatest Hell humans will experience in fact lies in the obstacle and resistance we encounter in others to our own fulfillment and meaning. Although Sartre exaggerates the crimes of the room's occupants in order to heighten the intensity of the play, he finds the same inevitable inability to communicate and connect in the everyday lives of every individual.
For the existentialist, life itself holds "no exit", a fact which each participant in life (so the existentialist believes) experiences to varying degrees. Under everything lies the core conviction that life offers no transcendence for the individual, regardless of how much he or she longs for it. Both Heaven and Hell fall squarely within the human sphere, with the question being whether Heaven can even be attained. There is no doubt that Sartre suggests Hell is the inevitable destination for many, consisting of lives filled with harm to oneself and others through a series of mistakes, folly and human evil. And one could argue that Sartre here implies that ALL humans find themselves in this Hell if they but look and contemplate it.
And thus I believe it is Sartre's suggestion that it is the futility and emptiness of life itself which offers "no exit".
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