{image1}The first person on stage is Michael DiPadova playing a bellboy in the hotel that is Hell. He lifts the tarp off three pieces of furniture: a footstool, a wooden-back chair and a dusty red sofa with a letter opener resting on one of its cushions. It appears as though he's laying eyes on the room for the first time, but that's to be expected. There are probably an infinite number of rooms in the hotel that is Hell.
The bellboy proceeds to show three people into the room: a journalist who died from gun fire, a working class girl who died from a gas leak and a rich girl who died of pneumonia. These three strangers are destined to spend eternity together in hell in Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit." As artistic director of Nevermore Theatre, DiPadova not only plays one of Hell's bellboys, but also directs Sartre's existential classic as a part of the newly-formed company's inaugural season.
DiPadova plays the bellboy as an ingratiating hospitality industry worker who genuinely likes his job and takes a great deal of pride in his work. One gets the impression that Hell wouldn't be that bad if upper management would simply get its act together. As one of the characters states towards the end of the play, "Hell is other people." The place itself isn't that bad, it's the people who go there who will torture themselves and each other because of their own psychological geography. Sartre's Hell is a place where people go to torture themselves.
Rick Pendzich plays Vincent Cradeau, the first guest to arrive. He's an award-winning pacifist journalist dressed in a suit and tie-a young man with a beard. There's some question early-on in the play that he may be a coward-gone to Hell for deserting his duty in a war, but dialogue proves him to be much more complicated.
The problem is that Pendzich doesn't allow the character a very broad range of emotional expression. Fear, anger and distress are amongst the character's primary emotions and every time they come up, Pendzich seems to express them in the same way, making the character seem rather flat. This is something of a disappointment, as Sartre's dialogue allows the actor an opportunity for a much more emotionally textured performance in the role than Pendzich allows.
That being said, Pendzich's performance was very emotionally charged. The character's emotions come through with the unrelenting force of a hammer, which plays well against the character of Inez.
Inez Serrano is the second guest to be led into the room. Alix Martin cuts an impressive figure as the strong-willed, young secretary. She exudes confidence in a pair of black Doc Martens, form-fitting blue jeans and a T-Shirt from an Irish Pub. Martin plays Serrano with a dark malicious streak tempered by passions and something mysteriously more underneath it all. The coughs she occasionally choked-back opening night seemed authentic and may have even come from a head cold that's been traveling around the metro area these past few weeks. Even if they were authentic, they ended up being a clever little detail considering that her character died from a gas leak. It was as though, even in the afterlife, her lungs still carried traces of the noxious fumes that did her in.
The final person to enter the room is Betsy Skowbo in the role of Estelle: the conceited rich girl who died of pneumonia. She wears a simple, elegant dress and seems to demand attention from everyone in the room. Skowbo gives plenty of depth to a character who desperately wants to be uncomplicated. It's the little details that really elevate her performance. There's a subtly manipulative sophistication to her performance that makes the revelation of the full extent of her wickedness at the end of the play all the more realistic and shocking.
As is apparent most predominantly in Alix Martin's costuming, Michael DiPadova has taken Sartre's play out of its original mid-twentieth century Europe and placed it in a much more recent North America. Some of the story gets a bit muddled in translation.
Nevermore's greatest departure from the original script is the set. They haven't got one. The door that was so essential and symbolic in Sartre's script doesn't exist in this production, because there's no wall for it to exist on. We can see quite clearly that they could leave at any time. The people in Hell are kept there by their own free will. The walls in the prisons of Hell are put there by those who have exiled themselves there.
Nevermore Theatre's production of "No Exit," plays now through May 29th at the Off Broadway Theatre. Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at (414) 278-0765.
