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No Exit
No Exit
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Author: Jean-Paul Sartre Adapted by: Paul Bowles Publisher: Samuel French (cover may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 60 Pub. Date: 2010 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0573613052 ISBN-13: 9780573613050 Cast Size: 2 female, 2 male
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About
the Play:
No Exit has long been a favourite of acting teachers for
Male Monologues and Female/Female Scenes.
"L'enfer, c'est les autres" ("Hell is other people") – Jean-Paul Sartre, winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for
Literature
No Exit (English-language
version of Huis-Clos)
is a full-length drama by Jean-Paul Sartre,
adapted from the French by Paul Bowles.
Imagine yourself in a room with two people whom you've never met.
There is no darkness, only light. Each of your thoughts and actions
affect the other. You reflect on the past while seeing the present in
a world you are no longer a part. Is this Heaven or Hell? You decide
in No Exit, a darkly comic
masterpiece by Jean-Paul
Sartre.
No Exit centres on three
strangers – two women and one man each of whom died with the weight
of various sins – who find themselves in the afterlife.
They are escorted by a valet
into a plain room, where they're locked in together. The windows are
bricked up; there are no mirrors; the electric lights can never be
turned off; and there is no exit. They
interrogate each other about why they are there. They soon realize
they've been placed together to make each other miserable for eternity,
ultimately realizing that this situation will be their Hell. Extravagant life stories,
nefarious confessions, and a love triangle come out as the characters
work out what to do in Hell.
Damned
to spend eternity in one another's company, they can only
see themselves through one another's eyes. Their curiosity quickly turns cruel. The irony of this Hell is
that its torture is not of the rack and fire, but of the burning
humiliation of each damned soul as it is stripped of its pretenses by the
cruel curiosity of the damned. Here the soul is shorn of secrecy, and
even the blackest deeds are mercilessly exposed to the fierce light
of Hell. It is an eternal torment in which Hell emerges as the
togetherness of people. No Exit is the best-known work of
French playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
No Exit in a translation by Paul Bowles was widely praised as a "phenomenon of theatre" when it premiered in 1946 at the Biltmore Theatre on
Broadway in New York City. The
play has become an acting-course
favourite and a staple of student theatre groups. It has
been performed in regional, fringe festival, high school, college, and
community theatre productions.
Cast: 2 female, 2 male
What people say:
"No Exit offers
a post-Freudian version of Hell." — New York Times
"...it not only encapsulates
Sartre's existentialist philosophy, but left its indelible mark on
Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's hothouse dramas."
— The Guardian
(UK)
"There's no need for fire and
brimstone in No Exit. Jean-Paul
Sartre's vision of hell revolves around other people, how
they see us, and more importantly, how they can damn us with their
very eyes." — The Mercury News
About the Playwright:
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French novelist,
playwright, and biographer, and he is widely considered one of the
greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best
remembered as the founder of French existentialism and his books have
exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, art and
politics. During the war he completed the major work Being
and Nothingness that eventually established his reputation
as an existential philosopher. He was a prolific playwright,
producing, among other works Huis-Clos
(No Exit). In 1960, he published his second basic
philosophical work, Critique of
Dialectical Reason. In 1964, his account of his childhood,
Words, received worldwide acclaim. That same year he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature, which he refused. The Times (UK)
described him as "One
of the most brilliant and versatile writers as well as one of the
most original thinkers of the twentieth century.”
Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was an American expatriate
composer, author, and translator who lived 52 years in Tangier,
Morocco. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland and established
his reputation early as a gifted composer – his music for Tennessee
Williams includes the settings for The Glass Menagerie, Summer and
Smoke, and Sweet Bird of Youth. In 1945 he returned to writing short
stories and by 1947, when he went to live in Tangier, fiction had
become his major focus. Though most celebrated for his first novel,
The Sheltering Sky, his prolific career included more than a
dozen subsequent volumes of fiction; he has written nonfiction and
poetry also. He is a folklorist of consequence and a translator of
such authors as Jean Paul Sartre, for whose play Huis Clos
he coined the title No Exit. The Times (UK) described
him as "one of the most unusual, unconventional and gifted
men of his time,"
and The Independent (UK) wrote: "Bowles was a mystic,
a man of many abilities ... he will be seen as a major
twentieth-century writer."
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