02/17 @ 1:00pm - JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S NO EXIT

February 17, 2008

Brave New World Reperetory Theatre

5th annual play reading salon series.
FOOD, WINE AND A READING
WITH SOME OF BROOKLYN’S BEST PROFESSIONAL ACTORS

Returns to Issue Project Room with
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S NO EXIT
Directed by Royston Coppenger
With Karl Greenberg, Claire Beckman*, Chris-Lindsay-Abaire*, Damon Pooser* and Alvin Hippolyte
*indicates members of actors equity association.

BRUNCH 12:30; READING 1:00.

Director’s note:
No Exit was first performed at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris in May 1944, just a few months before the city was liberated by the Allies. Perhaps the experience of living in occupied France influenced Sartre’s portrait of the doomed trio locked in an eternal prison, with nothing to do but tear each other down. Sartre’s glum antihero Garcin is often seen as a kind of wry self-portrait of the author, filled with a mixture of grandiose desire and bitter self-contempt. The women who surround him, Estelle and Inez, are themselves mutually exclusive contradictions: Estelle eternally addicted to love and romance, Inez eternally addicted to destroy what she can’t possess. In the play Sartre shows us that imprisonment isn’t created by the prison itself; it’s what you do with the boundaries you’re given. Or, to quote the play’s most famous line, “Hell is other people”.