No Exit December 9, 2010

The University of St. Thomas Drama Department will present a production of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, for two nights only, Dec. 9-10 in Jones Theater, 3910 Yoakum.

No Exit is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the audience is introduced to three characters who are locked in a windowless room that they soon realize is actually hell. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they are left to probe each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories, gradually realizing that this is their eternal punishment: they are each other's torturers, resulting in the play’s famous line, “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (hell is other people).

The concept that hell is other people is a seductive one. The way in which people relish other’s ability to behave so hellishly is a guilty pleasure. The sheer grotesqueness of confrontational reality TV (Jersey Shore, Big Brother) and the rapt attention to gossip of celebrity divorces, addictions, and affairs is the rotting apple of America’s eye. Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit confronts this concept with a finer sense of taste.

UST’s production, directed by UST senior drama major, Louis Whisenant, seeks a poignant synthesis between the presumed ugliness of these contemporary celebrity lives and Sartre’s original philosophical and intellectual endeavor to peer inside the corrupted mind. Not only can we imagine that hell is other people, but we might further imagine that hell is Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Anniston as the slanderous media would have us believe.

Tickets will be free of charge and can be reserved by calling 713-525-3520. The house will open at 7:30 p.m. and the show will begin at 8 p.m. with no intermission.