In Theatrical Hell with No Exit

By Phuong Tran ‘15

Published February 2015

From left to right: Marianne Virnelson ‘17 as Inez, Quan (Samuel) Sun ‘17 as Boy, Bentley Kennedy-Stone ‘16 as Cradeau, and Olivia Wray ‘16 as Estelle discover that “Hell is other people!” in Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. 

Photo courtesy of OCR

“You have to be more disgusted by her,” said Director-in-Residence JD Glickman to Olivia Wray ‘16 in their rehearsal for the upcoming Wildcat Theatre spring production, No Exit. “There is no politeness here. These characters are here to torture each other.” An hour had passed, yet Wray (Estelle)  and Marianne Vimelson ‘17 (Ines) kept playing the same scene over and over again, until Wray completely transformed into Estelle, burst out in torrential anger, and spit with immense disgust to Ines’ face.

That is one of the major scenes in No Exit, a 1944 existential play written by French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. The play tells an after-life story of three deceased characters, Vincent Cradeau, Ines Serranos, and Estelle Rigault, who are locked up together in a room for eternity. These damned souls expect to be tortured in Hell for past sins, but come to realize that they were put in the same room to torture each other ad infinitum. No Exit is the artistic manifestation of Sartre’s idea about the look of the “Other” that causes one to see and shape oneself through the “Other”’s eyes. According to Glickman, a professional actor and director who came to Randolph this semester all the way from Sweden to direct No Exit, while the play is small with only four characters, it is extremely challenging, both to himself and to the cast.

No Exit will be played in two weeks, Feb. 21-22 and Feb. 27-28, at 7:30 in the Lab Theatre, Legget Building. The cast is a diversity of actors with varying acting levels, including Bentley Kennedy Stone ‘16 (Vincent Cradeau), Olivia Wray ‘16 (Estelle), Marianne Vimelson ‘17 (Inez Serrano), and Quan (Samuel) Sun ‘17 (Boy). Director Glickman designed the model for the set himself, featuring a white and bright glass-walled room with minimal decoration and furniture. He wanted to recreate a cramped, lonely, and suspending place from which the audience can view the actors and feel their inescapable desperation. “I want to wrap them (the audience) around and keep it really tight. They are there, in the room, but at the same time, they are not there.”

Assistant Professor of performance and directing, Brooke Edwards believed that it’s time the theatre department takes on an experimental and demanding play such as No Exit. “When you pick show for academic theatre, you always have to think about the student body that you have and find a genre or area of theatre that they haven’t been introduced to,” said Edwards. “No Exit requires a different style of acting to create a sense of heightened reality. The actors really have to break down and think about the movements, the dialogues, and use all that to help them reach that state of heightened drama.”

Having the student actors understand the inner working of the characters and grow into them is what both Edwards and director Glickman hoped to achieve. “I use the Chekhov method in my acting and teaching, and this method requires the actors to rely a lot on their imagination,” shared Glickman. “I want them to be truthful in the play and respond truthfully. Even though rehearsals can be heated at times, I am thrilled to be here, directing this play and watching all of them coming closer and closer to getting the essence of the characters. The characters may not know themselves, but the actors have to know how a person who doesn’t know themselves behave.”

Glickman also thinks that No Exit is a challenge to the cast because it is centered around pain. “The characters are only acting out their own pain: They push the others away or pull them in when they have pain,” said Glickman. He also told The Sundial that sometimes the actors even shared with him their experiences with pain; and he tried to help them channel those experiences into their understanding and playing of the characters. 

Sartre’s main characters serve as each other’s tortue in Hell.
Photo courtesy of OCR

As the characters wrestled with the pain of narcissism, the actors themselves were also struggling with another kind of pain, necessary to their artistic growth. “Playing Estelle has been a huge struggle for me, and it still is,” shared Wray. She was pained by several desperate attempts at getting to the core of her character as well as all the emotional rollercoasters inevitable to rehearsal. “He (Glickman) tends to yell a lot, which can be intimidating at times,” she said. “But he doesn’t do it to make us feel as though we have no talent. He does it to get us to fully explore the world in which we have to live in on stage, to explore our characters, to explore the wants and needs of our characters.”

“He is brutally honest, but without his honesty, we wouldn’t get anywhere,” Wray said after a long pause. “While the process was tough, it was well worth it.”

It was, indeed, worth it. In their last rehearsal, Wray took the stage on the second run-through after an unsuccessful and emotionally exhaustive performance. Something clicked and all of a sudden, she was Estelle, in hell and truly trapped. “Nothing was forced and the moments flowed. I was a vain, self-righteous bitch who wants to have sex with the only man in the room, despite him being a completely unappealing person.” 

Wray’s transformation made watching No Exit a whole new experience. It was clear that director Glickman was greatly moved. “I would pay to watch this,” he exclaimed. “It was so good I didn’t want it to end.”