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Todd Levin
HUIS CLOS PARTIE DEUX
(No Exit, Act II)
When French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporary existential masterpiece for stage, No Exit (Huis Clos) was first produced, theater audiences and critics alike were disturbed by its unsympathetic characters and unrelentingly bleak thesis—succinctly stated by Garcin, the journalist-coward trapped in a room with two other craven individuals, all fated to act as each other's torturers for eternity—"Hell is other people."
Even more disturbed by the play's production was Sartre himself—not because he'd created a Frankenstein's monster that had grown out of his artistic control, but because his own artistic control had been, in a sense, wrenched away by No Exit's director. When Sartre presented his astonishing piece of theater to Claude Foussant, the director-in-residence at the Théatre du Vieux-Colombier, Foussant was stunned by the play's first act but perplexed by the short second act that takes place after a brief curtain fall.
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