Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ imagines a three-sided Hell

In a 1971 episode of Rod Serling’s little-remembered TV series Night Gallery, John Astin (of Addams Family fame) plays a hippie who dies in a fiery car crash. He then discovers himself locked in a room with a hard-of-hearing old man in a rocking chair, a couple showing 8,000 slides of their Mexican vacation and – worst of all – a stack of easy-listening records on auto-play.

Clad in a red suit with pointy horns, and carrying a pitchfork, Old Beelzebub appears and tells him: “It’s a curious thing, but they have the exact same room up there [gesturing upwards]. You see, while this room is absolute Hell for you, up there it is someone else’s idea of Heaven.”

“Bummer!” yells the hippie, prone and pounding the floor in frustration. Cut to commercial.

The setup is more or less the same – minus the cheesy humor – in existentialist playwright and novelist John-Paul Sartre’s drama No Exit, first produced in 1944 Paris. Alan Mohney Jr. is a directing a production at the Off-Central in St. Petersburg, opening Thursday and running through Nov. 19.

“No Exit resonates,” Mohney believes, “because it’s at the heart of what the theater is, which is a study of the human condition. It’s about three people, from three different backgrounds, who find themselves in a place that none of them expected to be. Nor do they want to be, but they have to be. And what that does to each of their psyches, and egos, and everything else involved in being human.”

The place in question, we come to find out, is Hell. It’s really just a room with a couple of chairs, cheap wallpaper and a perpetually-locked door.

There’s Ines, a vulgar bully who seduced and then killed her cousin’s wife; Cradeau, a weak-hearted narcissist who went AWOL from the Army and was summarily executed; and vain, pompous Estelle, who married an older man for his money, got involved with someone younger, then gave birth to his baby and murdered it.

These awful people will be stuck together for eternity. And Sartre’s point is that they are each other’s only mirror, confidante, conscience and sounding board. They claw, fight and squirm. “Hell,” observes Cradeau, once he figures it all out, “is just other people.”

The audience is supposed to feel just a bit uncomfortable. “Every single person who sees this show is going to see a little bit of themselves in every one of these characters,” Mohney says.

The Off-Central cast includes Jenna Jane as Ines, Cornelio “Coky” Aguilera as Cradeau and Alexa Perez as Estelle. Anthony Gervais plays the damnably smug “bellboy” who first escorts the trio into their chamber of perpetual horrors.

“I looked for people who could work at the core elements of each of these characters,” Mohney says. “It wasn’t easy, because I had a lot of choices for each of the roles.” Out of this abundance of riches, he continues, he was thrilled to find “the best matchup between the three to be stuck in that room together.”

As with all existential works, there’s a deeper meaning to No Exit. According to Mohney, “as hard as we try, we have no control. I can’t make the world think that I’m the greatest director or the greatest actor in the world, or that I’m going to win a Pulitzer Prize in drama or anything like that.

“As much as I want people to believe that, it doesn’t matter because we’re only ever judged through the eyes of others, which we have no control over.”

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