A Glittering New Entrance for Exit the King

You know that the Broadway revival of Exit the King stars Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon, as well as Tony winner Andrea Martin and Lauren Ambrose. You know that Ionesco was, like, a really big playwright of the 20th century. But if you don’t know much else about this surreal satire, that’s okay— we’re here to help! As Exit the King closes in on opening night, here’s our guide to one of the original “absurdists” and the final work produced on Broadway in his lifetime. But why is a play about the slow death of a 400-year-old king less popular than one about a small French town populated with people who turn into rhinoceroses?

Age Is But a Number
“When I was born, I was almost 14 years old,” says the protagonist in Eugene Ionesco’s 1955 play Jack, or The Submission. “That’s why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.” The play spins an outlandish tale about a young man who rebels against his parents because they urge him to marry a girl with two noses, insisting he must have a girl with three noses. Not your average autobiographical script, yet that one line neatly sums up Ionesco: The Wonder Years.

Born on November 26, 1909, in Slatina—a small Romanian town roughly 90 miles away from Bucharest—Ionesco spent most of his childhood in France, where his family relocated shortly after his birth. The eldest son of a Romanian father and a French mother had modest career ambitions at first. “At age three, I wanted to sell roasted chestnuts,” he said in a television interview in 1961 readily available on YouTube. “At three and a half, I wanted to be an officer. At four, I wanted to become a doctor. Not any doctor, but my family doctor, Dr. Durand, with his beard.”

That goal, however, was thwarted the moment his mother took him to see a puppet show in Luxembourg. “All the kids were laughing except me,” he recalled. “My mother thought I was bored and wanted to leave. But I wasn’t bored. I was flabbergasted, smitten.” Then destiny paid a visit, during a transcendent incident that makes most bug-bitten “eureka” moments feel quaint and un-ambitious by comparison.

According to Deborah B. Gaensbauer’s book Eugene Ionesco Revisited, the young boy was walking in a small French town. The sun was radiant, the sky blue, and Ionesco suddenly felt so luminous, so at peace inside himself, he floated off the ground. Touching down on Earth again, the world seemed different, a total disappointment rife with decay, corruption and meaningless efforts.

Throughout his life, Ionesco remained both in awe of the world and dismayed by what he saw as the worthlessness of human existence—a polarity that inspired some of the most most audacious, outrageous and hilarious plays of the 20th century.

Youth Is Wasted on the Young
While his father wanted him to become an engineer, Ionesco pursued a career in literature and poetry, supporting himself in his early adult life teaching high-school French and working in publishing. While studying for his never completed doctorate in French at the University of Bucharest, his poetry appeared frequently in local journals. At 25, he released Nu No!, a collection of sarcastic essays that attacked the fundamentals of Romanian literature and provoked considerable scandal.

Ionesco wouldn’t write a play until 1950. Now 40 and married with one daughter, he decided he ought to learn English, so he began to tutor himself by copying passages from a standard-issue English primer. He indeed learned the language, but the book taught the neophyte playwright much more than fluency in English. For instance, the primer told him there were seven days in the week, the floor was down and the ceiling was up. And instead of thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know,” Ionesco claimed to be pretty astonished by these indisputable facts.

He also became obsessed with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the so-called “Dick and Jane” pair featured in the primer, particularly Mrs. Smith’s methodical quest for truth, how she informed her own husband that they had several children, lived near London and had a housekeeper named Mary.

“A strange phenomenon took place,” Ionesco later wrote. “The text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The cliches and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense, gave way to pseudo-cliches and pseudo-truisms. These disintegrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end, language disintegrated into disjointed fragments of words.”

Ionesco turned this subversive revelation into his first play, The Bald Soprano, about middle-class family plagued by bloodless routines and meaningless formalities. Premiering at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris in 1950, the play was performed before largely unenthusiastic audiences. Those who were enthusiastic, however, organized a successful campaign to attract a bigger audience for the play. Not just a working playwright, Ionesco was about to become an international celebrity.

Absurd Minds Think Alike
Publishing new plays throughout the 1950s, Ionesco tried to accomplish with humans what he saw those puppeteers do when he was four years old: create a simplified, grotesque version of life as we think we know it, one in which something or someone else is pulling the strings. “To me, the world seems that way,” he said. “To me, the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful—if I keep going, I’ll get angry with God.”

Detesting traditional dramatic structures as much as he despised authority figures, Ionesco helped patent a style of drama that was the polar opposite of the kitchen-sink realism of William Inge and other successful writers of that era. He thought theater wasn’t just capable of reflecting the truth but also an “imaginary,” perhaps more enlightening, one. Thus his plays shunned linear plots and the laws of physics and psychology and courted nonsensical comedy, dialogue loaded with non sequiturs and surreal, ridiculous settings. The kitchen sink could still be used a prop, only it wouldn’t stay a sink for long.

“I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage,” Ionesco once declared, “then turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theater, and it is the place where one dares the least.”

The one-act plays The Chairs and The Lesson were the first of Ionesco’s plays to be produced on Broadway, opening at the Phoenix Theatre on January 9, 1958, with a cast that included Eli Wallach and Joan Plowright and closing 22 performances later. It wasn’t until Martin Esslin published his book Theatre of the Absurd in 1961 that the masses could process the oddness of a work like 1959’s Rhinoceros, involving the residents of a small town who turn into rhinos over the course of three acts. Along with Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, Esslin presented Ionesco as a heralding a new kind of the theater, one in which highbrow themes and idea were executed with a shrug of the shoulders and some cheap laughs.

Published in 1962, Exit the King made its Broadway debut six years later, opening at the Lyceum Theatre on January 9, 1968. Loaded with fourth-wall breaking and self-referential jokes, it presents King Berenger, a 400-year-old monarch of failing health whose reign has long outlasted its welcome. “You are going to die in an hour and a half,” his first wife announces, before emphasizing, “You’re going to die at the end of this show.” That he does. Still, it’s fun to watch as the king chooses not to go quietly into that dark night.

Calling the play Ionesco’s most accessible, and possibly his best, New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the flimsy set design and some of the performances, which he felt failed to honor such a ridiculously unhinged satire. Richard Easton starred as King Berenger with Eva Le Gallienne as his aging first wife, Queen Marguerite. It closed after 47 performances.

And in the End…
In standard biographical sketches of Ionesco, Exit the King is relegated to the “other plays include…” list, while works such as The Chairs, The Lesson and Rhinoceros merit full paragraphs. Some even considered it to be less representative of Ionesco’s signature absurdist style. As one review of a regional production explained, “It happens in chronological order. The dialogue is understandable. Its characters don’t turn into a herd of rhinoceros or detonate in a fit of homicidal lunacy.”

Hence Exit the King lingered on the sideline of Ionesco’s oeuvre, the Jan Brady to Rhinoceros’ Marsha, if you will. The playwright passed away in Paris in 1994, at the age of 84, but the last of his plays to open on Broadway during his lifetime was ripe for rediscovery.

Several years ago, Geoffrey Rush, who has worked onstage regularly in his home country of Australia, happened upon a copy of Exit the King and was shocked that such a vital, original work had gone so unnoticed. Co-writing a new translation with Neil Armfield, who went on to direct, Rush starred in hit productions in Melbourne and Sydney in 2007. One critic deemed it the best piece of theater he had ever seen. Another review began, “Geoffrey Rush is f***ing good.” And so on.

But Ionesco on Broadway? Hey, he was a hit a decade ago in Theatre de Complicite’s stylish production of The Chairs. And Rush and Armfield smartly enlisted an A-list American star, Susan Sarandon to play Queen Marguerite, the aged first wife who’s done up in unflattering makeup and pulls a 12-foot train. For her first Broadway appearance in 37 years, Sarandon told Broadway.com, “I didn’t want to star in something by Tennessee Williams that would inevitably invite comparisons to previous performances by other actresses.”

Co-star Lauren Ambrose, who plays the King’s second, far-younger wife, admits she didn’t really “get” the play until she saw Rush and Armfield let their super-twisted, gleefully over-the-top intentions loose during rehearsal. Explains Andrea Martin, “There’s clowning, burlesque, physical comedy, vaudeville, strobe lights and exaggerated costumes.”

“When people call it absurd, I don’t know what they’re talking about,” playwright Tina Howe, who adapted a double bill of The Bald Soprano and The Lesson at Atlantic Theatre Company five years ago, says of Ionesco. “And I never understand when people say to me that Arthur Miller is realistic, because to me Ionesco is realistic.”

Watch that 1961 interview with Ionesco on YouTube, and you’ll see someone change from a suited-up mature author to a giggly young boy in the flash of a smile. Ionesco didn’t hate the world. He just hated that fact that there was absolutely nothing we could do to alter its history—or our own.