Airaldi's mugging is usually more in control than it is here. Every step carries a facial exclamation point, and he punctuates his dialogue with LeBow's character, Garcin, about the ground rules of hell with hysterical laughter. Many in the audience obviously found this amusing; I found it mostly annoying.
In his 1944 play, Sartre dramatized his existential philosophy. Garcin and the two women who join him recount what sentenced them to hell, acting out Sartre's themes of why existence is more important than essence -- basically, actions speak louder than words -- and how freedom and salvation are always possibilities, albeit frightening ones, even when you're locked in a room with two people who seem like your torturers.
If you were an actor, you couldn't do much better than being locked in a room with LeBow, Paula Plum, and Karen MacDonald. You might even think you'd gone to heaven instead of the other place. They are all local treasures, and the forced intimacy of ''No Exit" brings out the best in them as they both display their comic talents and mine darker psychological territories.
They also bring out the best in Sartre. It's when the valet leaves that the real fun begins. LeBow's Garcin is a pacifist journalist who fled Rio in wartime rather than stand and fight for his principles; Plum's hard-as-nails Inez died in a murder-suicide with her female lover and now has the hots for MacDonald's frilly Estelle, who turns out to be a murderer and now only has eyes for Garcin.
Meanwhile, the stage -- bare except for three small sofas -- goes up and down like a see-saw or throws the characters to the floor to underscore their shifting equilibrium, adding liveliness to a situation that is, well, dead. Often the effect is comic, but there are times where it adds skin-tingling tension, as when MacDonald is lifted skyward while describing the act that condemned her to hell.
