Henri Lubatti in Exit the King. [Photo by Daniel Reichert]
King Bérenger I, ruler of an unnamed and rapidly disintegrating country, is told he will die by the end of the play. The audience checks the program. The play runs about ninety minutes. And so begins one of the more unusual contracts in modern theater: a promise, made early and kept exactly, that everyone in the room will watch a man of supposed absolute power surrender that power in real time.
Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King, which begins previews May 3 at A Noise Within in East Pasadena, asks its lead actor to do something close to impossible — to be hilarious and devastating in roughly equal measure, often within the same breath. Henri Lubatti, the veteran stage and screen actor taking on Bérenger, has been finding that the trick is partly in the body.
“I’m a little sore,” he said in a recent interview, with the rueful laugh of an actor who has been spending his rehearsal weeks falling down.
The soreness has a source. Director Michael Michetti has brought in Matt Walker, a specialist in clown, movement and physical comedy, to work with the cast — a structural choice that distinguishes this production from a more conventional staging of the play. Lubatti said the collaboration has been unusually intensive by the standards of American regional theater, where rehearsal periods are typically compressed. The result is a Bérenger who can register physical decline without simply moving slower and slower for an hour and a half.
“A lot of the clowning moves that are demonstrating his failure are physically demanding,” he said. “They aren’t necessarily in keeping with the premise that his legs are no longer functioning properly, but visually they totally support it. It’s very theatrical, but at the same time, effective and emotionally real and true.”
Lubatti, whose television credits include Sleeper Cell, True Blood and 24, and whose stage work has taken him from Seattle Rep to the Mark Taper Forum, is candid about what the work is costing and giving him. He has spoken of aging people in his life, and of a parent who has passed away. He calls the rehearsal process “an emotional education and opportunity to process it while working on the piece.” He uses the word “cathartic.” Few working actors talk this directly about why a part is landing.
“There is a theme in the play about the baggage — I don’t like that word — the things one puts on in life,” Lubatti said. “And the idea that getting toward the end is about a deliberate stripping away of those things. And if it’s not done deliberately, it needs to be done for you, or it will be done to you.”
In that final exchange, he said, Marguerite “discovers him again, but also the real him.” The actors playing the two queens — Joy DeMichelle as Queen Marguerite and Erika Soto as Queen Marie, the younger wife who urges Bérenger to enjoy the moment and deny what is coming — are, in Lubatti’s view, the production’s quiet emotional engine. Audiences may arrive expecting a rivalry between the wives. What they will get instead, he said, is “a revelation, a revealing of the true nature of the relationships.”
Ionesco wrote Exit the King in 1962, in what Lubatti called the period writing “not even in the shadow, but in the glow of the wars of 1940 in Europe and the whole early 20th century and the fascism.”
The figure of a leader in denial about his own ending is one some audiences may find resonant today. Lubatti is careful here. The production, he stressed, is not pursuing a contemporary political reading.
“It’s possible audiences today will look for those parallels,” he said. “As a production, that isn’t the intent. It is a piece that speaks as an independent piece, separate from the current world politics.”
He paused. “Having said that, there is something tragic about human history that we do see, whether we’re thinking close to home or anywhere else, where the power structure does lead to” — he searched for a word — “this. There is something people will take away. But it is not something we’re trying to explore in particular.”
For audiences who hesitate at the phrase “theater of the absurd,” Lubatti has a brisk argument. Exit the King, he said, is the most narratively straightforward of Ionesco’s major plays. One room. One day. No surreal lurches in time or space. The premise is in the title. The premise is announced on page seven. After that, he said, “all you need to do is sit back and watch him go through it in real time.”
“It is not hard to follow,” he added. “It’s unbelievably clear what’s happening. It’s the watching that maybe is the pleasure.”
A Noise Within, with 30 years of company history, is one of the few American theaters operating with a resident artist program — what Lubatti described as “a family of artists and technicians and actors committed to the theater itself.” The thrust-stage configuration places audiences close enough to make the king’s slow vanishing feel like something happening to a person in the room, not a figure on a distant platform. Lubatti, who has watched Los Angeles theater absorb and recover from the pandemic years, sees a “kind of a resurgence in terms of audience” that has “re-energized everything.”
The king’s last moments, when they arrive, will not be loud. The clowning recedes. The kingdom, by then, has nearly finished collapsing. Marguerite, who has spent the play insisting on the truth Bérenger does not want, performs a final act of attention.
There you are.
Exit the King by Eugène Ionesco, directed by Michael Michetti, presented by A Noise Within. Previews begin Sunday, May 3, 2026. Visit anoisewithin.org for current dates and pricing.
