“You are your life, and nothing else”

Leslie Armstrong
Staff Writer
When you picture hell, I’ll bet you see red-hot fire and ghastly torture devices, pitchforks, horns and the like. There exists a fresh image of hell, however: French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Hell is other people” is the prize line from his existentialist play, No Exit.
Theatre Bassaris, a York University based theatre company, threw an imaginative and brilliant production of Sartre’s angsty play. On a shoestring budget of $1,000, they transformed the barren Eleanor Winters Art Gallery (EWAG) from March 2-5 into the strangest hell I’ve ever seen.
Light bulbs hung by wires from the ceiling. A single chaise lounge served as furniture, waiting to be fought over. Two clunky television sets buzzed away on either side, idle and blue.
EWAG, which normally showcases visual arts, set the stage for this production on account of a few factors.
“One reason is that it’s free,” said director Wade Noble. “It’s really convenient for all the York community to come out and see.”
Given the ratio of dialogue to visual appeal in No Exit, the choice of venue was also attributed to the plainness of the room. “It’s really artistically stimulating,” said Noble. “It’s just a blank room. You can really transform it.”
This simple set made way for a complex and edgy dialogue between three characters. Garcin, a callous deserter, Inez, a homicidal lesbian, and Estelle, a beautiful imbecile, find themselves trapped together for eternity in a single room. As they slowly find their comfort levels, they admit their sins one by one, discovering that they are each other’s torturers. Sartre’s famous line stems from the concept presented in this play.
Aside from this bitter grain of truth, the play, and more importantly the production, draws seriously on themes of morality. As Sartre repeatedly stressed in his philosophical career, a person is born into the world with inescapable responsibility. His or her actions do not rest with the fates – they rest with the individual who is the sole cause of his or her disposition. The responsibility and freedom are both paramount and terrifying.
Noble was concerned with imposing these themes on the audience – his artistic choice was to undercut the play, using the television sets, with clips of a continuous interview of its actors commenting on themes of morality.
“I was really trying to blur the lines between actor and character,” he said. “I think there’s a more effective way of addressing those themes, by using these personal interviews. What we did was we interviewed each core actor – it was about a two-hour interview – and we cut it down to what I thought really addressed those themes. You don’t know if it’s the character or the actor speaking. I was trying to convey ambiguity, to make the audience think. If they’re being forced to think, they’re being forced to examine the themes.”
Estelle’s immorality, for instance, is rooted from her own insecurity. Her character is deeply disturbed to find that there isn’t a single mirror in the room.
“You are your life and nothing else,” said Brandee Green, who played Estelle. She was quoting Jean-Paul Sartre. “But Estelle is her appearance and nothing else […] Having no mirror was like having nothing to look at and say, ‘I’m still there.’” Estelle doubts her existence the moment there is nothing, or nobody, to physically reflect it.
Sartre uses Estelle and the other characters to expose some of the most monstrous human flaws. I asked the actors what they did to embody these flaws in their
performances.
“What I try to do with each character,” said actor Alexi Aslanidis, “especially with my character, Garcin, is to try to find his enormous flaws in myself. To find in myself where those flaws are, to connect. To face them. To think about myself truly. The interview component really was the driving factor in that.”
No Exit was an innovative production of a timeless play, capturing Sartre’s dreadful atmosphere in small details. The valet mounted a ladder to place a sign reading “NO” beside the glowing EXIT sign in the gallery. He proceeded to tell us that the doors were locked and that if we needed to use the bathroom facilities, we had just missed our chance.
As I entered the gallery, I had asked the theatrical usher in the red velour jacket (later revealed to be the valet) if he was a member of the cast. “I don’t understand the question,” was his deadpan response. Priceless.