Erika Soto, Lynn Robert Berg, Henri Lubatti and Joy DeMichelle [Photo by Craig Schwartz]
The play deposits us inside a decaying kingdom on the last day of King Berenger’s reign over the living. His walls are crumbling, his doctors are baffled, and his two queens are locked in a quiet war of competing loyalties. What follows is less a plot than a prolonged existential reckoning — funny, tender and, finally, devastating.
Henri Lubatti anchors the evening as Berenger, delivering a performance of remarkable range. He enters blustering and petulant, a man accustomed to bending reality to his will, and he earns genuine laughs doing it. But Lubatti never lets the clowning calcify into caricature. As the play peels away Berenger’s defenses — layer by painful layer — something unexpectedly raw and recognizable emerges. By the final scene, his slow surrender carries real weight.
Erika Soto brings a luminous grace to the role of Marie, the younger queen whose devotion borders on the mystical. She is Berenger’s last tether to warmth and genuine (?) affection, and Soto plays that with quiet authority, navigating Ionesco’s tonal whiplash — from deadpan wit to aching sorrow — with apparent ease. The chemistry between the two leads gives the production its emotional spine.
The supporting cast matches its leads with equal investment. Joy DeMichelle, as the imperious first wife Queen Marguerite, commands every scene she enters — her icy authority providing the perfect counterweight to Lubatti’s unraveling monarch. Lynn Robert Berg, Ralph Cole Jr. and KT Vogt round out the court with sharp comic timing and genuine presence, each finding distinct humanity inside Ionesco’s deliberately skeletal character sketches. This is an ensemble that listens to one another.
Michetti’s direction finds the human pulse beneath the theatrical artifice, and the result is a company firing on all cylinders — no small feat in a play that demands its actors hold grief and absurdity in the same breath.
Exit the King runs through May 31 at A Noise Within, 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. Don’t be late — death ain’t waiting for no one. Not even a king. anoisewithin.org
