Fringe 2015: Idiopathic Ridiculopathy's 'Exit the King'

It’s painful to watch. Excruciating, in fact. It’s an example of Theater of the Absurd, the genre whose best-known playwright, Eugène Ionesco, is the author of this play. Most people consider absurd to be synonymous with humorous, but Ionesco never claimed to be humorous — or absurd. He preferred to call it the Theatre of Derision. He speaks of serious issues using surrealistic language.

What he presents here is the total disintegration of society and the death of its leaders. Worse than that, he says that even the memories of us will fade and die. Ionesco’s play predicts “a great and mighty nothingness.” Exit the King is a contemplation of helplessness and void.

Everybody dies

King Berenger (Robb Hutter) is 400 years old and has accomplished great things in his life. But now he is informed that he’s going to die in an hour and a half. Queen Marguerite, his first wife (played by Patricia Durante), repeats: “You're going to die at the end of the play.”

Berenger refuses to believe it. His counselors remind him that everybody dies, but “nobody living has,” he trenchantly replies. Then he reconsiders. Of course he’s going to die sometime, but today?

This omnipotent monarch thinks he can control everything in his kingdom. He, like the rest of humankind, puts himself at the center of his universe and tries to control everything that happens to him.

Formerly, he reigned over millions of subjects and even controlled the weather. Now the heater is broken, the washing machine has been sold to pay off national debts, and most of his population has disappeared. Ionesco’s 1962 script sounds prescient as a character announces “global chilling” and the queen complains about “all those disastrous wars.”

This production of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium — a group that stages nothing but the classics of the Theater of the Absurd — is directed by company cofounder and artistic director Tina Brock. The performance runs straight through rather than breaking into the traditional two acts, but it’s still too long. The same points are repeated too often. Marguerite tries to make Berenger face reality while Berenger’s second wife, Marie, tries to keep him from the pain of facing imminent death. There is, however, a touching final scene in which Marguerite becomes like a nurturing mother to a confused child, the dying king.

Hutter plays Berenger with querulous and desperate impatience. Durante is imperious as Marguerite, while Anna Lou Hearn is cute and blonde as the melodramatic second wife. Susan Giddings is an unpitying doctor, Jenna Kuerzi a sassy servant girl, and Bob Schmidt is a tower of quiet strength as the Guard.