Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) In the aftermath of World War II, a little-known writer and teacher, Jean-Paul Sartre, emerged as an intellectual and literary leader, gaining worldwide celebrity as the prophet of Jean Paul Sartre Paris 1948 existentialism. As Europeans tried to make sense of three decades of instability and destruction, existentialism became the most fashionable philosophical stance—its idea of absurdity within a meaningless universe rang true to those who faced bombed-out buildings, occupation and concentration camps. Though Sartre was not the first existentialist, he was certainly the most famous, and an international cult grew around him, his companion, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir, and their Paris meeting place, the Café de Flore. In his writings and political activity, Sartre warned against succumbing to repressive conformity, championing instead an authentic, engaged life.

Born in Paris, Jean-Paul never knew his naval officer father, who died when Jean-Paul was still an infant. His mother, a cousin of the famous Albert Schweitzer, and his grandparents raised him.

He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1929 and between 1931 and 1939 taught philosophy at Le Havre, Laon, and Paris. In 1932 he traveled to Berlin to study the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Jean Paul Sartre 1906 Sartre wrote several psychological works before his first novel, the autobiographical Nausea, brought him recognition in 1938. In Nausea, the protagonist Roquentin experiences disgust at the fact that people exist despite the fact that there is no reason to exist. The novel, as well as a collection of short stories, The Wall, expressed Sartre’s idea that to face an absence of abslolute values, one must engage in acts of creation.

In 1939 Hitler’s forces attacked Poland and France declared war. Sartre was drafted and stationed in Alsace on meteorological duties. He was captured in June 1940 and spent almost a year in a German Soldier Sarte 1939 prison camp. There he found a deep comradeship with his fellow prisoners: “In the Stalag I found a form of collective life that I hadn’t come across since the École Normale.” For his fellow prisoners, he produced an anti-Nazi propaganda play cloaked as a “very moving Christmas mystery.” My first experience in the theatre was especially fortunate. When I was a prisoner in Germany in 1940, I wrote, staged, and acted in a Christmas play which, while pulling the wool over the eyes of the German censor by means of simple symbols, was addressed to my fellow prisoners. No doubt it was neither a good play not well acted: the work of an amateur, the critics would say, a product of special circumstances. Nevertheless, on this occasion, as I addresses my comrades across the footlights, speaking to them o their state as prisoners, when I suddenly say them so remarkable silent and attentive, I realized what theatre ought to be—a great collective, religious phenomenon. (“The Forgers of Myths,” 1946)

In 1941 he escaped and joined the underground Resistance movement in occupied Paris, writing for the magazines Les Lettres Française and Combat. During the Occupation, Sartre wrote some of his most influential works, expressing his insistence on moral responsibility and active engagement in shaping one’s life. The play The Flies, a reworking of Euripides Orestes, premiered in 1943, its anti-authoritarian themes of revenge and justice eluding the Nazi censors due to its ancient setting. That same year, Sartre published Being and Nothingness, his theoretical analysis of the human condition, in which he argues that the “nothingness” of human essence allows each person infinite possibilities to shape his or her life. No meaning is attached to a person’s life; rather, each must forge meaning through choices and commitment to a role in the world: we create ourselves.

Sartre’s second play, No Exit, completed in the first months of 1944 was rehearsed in Beauvoir’s bedroom under the direction of Sartre’s colleague Albert Camus. Exigencies of the Occupation intervened (including the arrest of the lead actress), and the production was scuttled, though it finally premiered just before the liberation of France, in May 1944 at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, under the direction of Raymond Rouleau. Originally titled The Others, Sartre changed it to Huis clos, meaning “behind closed doors,” or, as a legal term, “in camera.” The play is most popularly known in English as No Exit. The play’s most famous expression, “Hell is other people”, Sartre partially explained in his preface to the Deutsche Gramophone recording of No Exit in 1965: Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. Which means that if my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell. And there are a vast number of people in the world who are in hell…. I wanted to show by means of the absurd the importance of freedom to us, that is to say the importance of changing acts by other acts. No matter what circle of hell we are living in, I think we a re free to break out of it. Sartre learned much about theatrical production through his friendship with the great director Charles Dullin, and he was fascinated by the art of acting, that an actor creates a character the audience agrees to believe, while at the same time knowing the actor is not, in fact, the character.

After the war, Sartre devoted himself to writing and political activity. He founded the political and literary review Modern Times, the primary forum for existential ideas. The Café de Flore, where Sartre, Beauvoir and the circle of intellectuals surrounding them met and argued, became a Mecca for intellectuals, disciples and curiosity seekers.

His writing inluded Existentailism and Humanism in 1946, and What Is Literature?in 1948, in which Sartre posited that literature should concern itself with human freeedom and that writing is a moral activity. His trilogy, The Roads to Freedom (1945-1949) drew on his experiences during the war. Sartre also wrote several biographies, Sartre & Beauvoir 1947 including Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), about writer and convicted felon Jean Genet.

It is through his dramatic works, however, that Sartre and his philosophy were most known. His plays dealt with racism, collective responsibility, the conflicts of politically engaged intellectuals, the creation of character, and, of course, human freedom. They include The Victors (1946), The Respectful Prostitute (1946), Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), an adaptation of Dumas’ Kean (1953), Nekrassov (1955), The Condemned of Altona (1959), an adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (1965) and several screenplays, including an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In 1964 Sartre published The Words, an account of his childhood. His final work was a three-volume of biography of Gustave Flaubert, called The Idiot of the Family (1971-72)

Sartre embraced communism without ever joining the party, and spent much time reconciling existentialism’s focus on individual self-determination with Marxism’s concern with socioeconomic forces. His early support of Stalinist policies led to his split with Camus—Sartre suggesting that in some cases the ends may justify the means. The Soviet invasion of Hungary led Sartre to distance himself with Soviet communism. He became an outspoken critic of French rule in Algeria, and supported the violent Algerian struggle for independence, leading an anti-Algerian group to bomb Sartre’s apartment. His Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, became his adopted daughter in 1965. At the invitation of philosopher Bertrand Russell, Sartre was a part of an effort to expose U.S. war crimes in Vietnam known as the Russell Tribunal.

Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, for work which, “rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far- reaching influence on our age.” Sartre refused the prize saying that “a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.” Despite his fame, Sartre led a relatively simple life with few possessions. Constant work, amphetamine use and a love of tobacco took their toll on Sartre’s health. (“Smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world,” said Sartre.) He died Jean Paul Sartre 1979 on April 15, 1980 from an edema of the lung. His funeral wound its way through the streets of Paris, attracting more than 25,000 people, from movie stars to dignitaries to average Parisians for whom the name of a philosopher-playwright had become a household word. Selected Works L'IMAGINATION, 1936 - Imagination: A Psychological Critique LA TRANSCENDANCE DE L'ÉGO, 1937 - The Transcendence of the Ego LA NAUSÉE, 1938 - Nausea LE MUR, 1938 - Muuri - film 1966, dir. by Serge Roullet ESQUISSE D'UNE THÉORIE DES ÉMOTIONS, 1939 - Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions L'IMAGINAIRE: PSYCHOLOGIE PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUE DE L'IMAGINATION,1940 - Psychology of Imagination L'ÉTRE ET LE NÉANT, 1943 - Being and Nothingness LES MOUCHES, 1943 - The Flies HUIS CLOS, 1944 - No Exit L'ÁGE DE RAISON, 1945 - Age of Reason LE SURSIS, 1945 - The Reprieve RÉFLEXIONS SUR LA QUESTION JUIVE, 1946 - Anti-Semite and Jew MORTS SANS SÉPULTURE, 1946 - The Victors L'EXISTENTIALISME EST UN HUMANISME, 1946 - Existentialism and Humanism LA PUTAIN RESPECTUEUSE, 1946 - The Respectful BAUDELAIRE, 1947 LES JEUX SONT FAITS, 1947 - The Chips Are Down SITUATIONS I, 1947 THÉÂTRE, 1947 QU'EST-CE QUE LA LITTÉRATURE?, 1947 - What is Literature LES MAINS SALES, 1948 - Dirty Hands L'ENGRENAGE, 1948 - In the Mesh SITUATIONS II, 1948 ENTRETIENS SUR LA POLITIQUÉ, 1949 SITUATIONS III, 1949 LA MORT DANS L'ÂME, 1949 - Iron in the Soul KEAN, 1951 LE DIABLE ET LE BON DIEU, 1951-The Devil and the Good Lord SAINT GENET, COMÉDIEN ET MARTYR, 1952 - Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr L'AFFAIRE HENRI MARTIN, 1953 Literary and Philosophical Essays, 1955 NEKRASSOV, 1955. QUESTIONS DE MÉTHODE, 1957 - Search for a Method LES SÉQUESTRÉS D'ALTONA, 1959 (prod.) - Loser Wins / The Condemned of Altona CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON DIALECTIQUE, 1960 - Critique of Dialectical Reason OURAGAN SUR LE SUCRE, 1960 - Sartre on Cuba BARIONA, 1962 - Bariona; or, The Son of Thunder LES MOTS, 1964 - The Words SITUATIONS IV: PORTRAITS, 1964 SITUATIONS V: COLONIALISME ET NÉO-COLONIALISME, 1964 SITUATIONS VI: PROBLÈMES DU MARXISME 1, 1964 LES TROYENNES, 1965 - The Trojan Women ŒUVRES ROMANESQUES, 1965 (5 vols.) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1965 SITUATIONS VII: PROBLÈMES DU MARXISME 2, 1965 - The Ghosts of Stalin QUE PEUT LA LITTÉRATURE?, 1965 Essays in Existentialism, 1967 Of Human Freedom, 1967 L'IDIOT DE LA FAMILLE, 1971-72 ( 3 vol.) - The Family Idiot SITUATIONS VIII: AUTOUR DE 1968, 1972 SITUATIONS IX: MÉLANGES, 1972 Politics and Literature, 1973 - Theatre The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2: Selected Prose, 1974 Between Existentialism and Marxism, 1974 SITUATIONS X, 1976 - Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken ŒUVRES ROMANESQUES, 1981 LETTRES AU CASTOR ET Á QUELQUES AUTRES I-II, 1983 LES CARNETS DE LA DRÓLE DE GUERRE, 1983 Sartre and the Theatre of Questions by Mark Poklemba

What inspired the most famous philosopher of his day to write for the stage? Sartre’s first venture into theatre occurred while he was a French prisoner of war, captured by the Nazis. Given permission to write and produce a Christmas play for the soldiers in his POW camp, Sartre penned a quasi-religious drama with subtle anti-Nazi themes. It escaped the censorship of his captors. Sartre quickly realized the potential of theatre in giving hope and a political message. After a year of imprisonment in Germany, Sartre negotiated his own release, and returning to occupied France he began working for the resistance. Initially his philosophy followed in the footsteps of Husserl and Heidegger—two forerunners of existentialism—but the desperate circumstances of the resistance forced Sartre to understand the urgency of making moral choices every day. When Nazi occupation forces began executing three innocent French civilians for each German soldier killed by the resistance, Sartre and his friends in the resistance movement found themselves on a moral tightrope. Their actions fueled murder. Had they all become guilty? Could they continue fighting and bear the blood they saw on their own hands? The situation shocked Sartre into a lifelong conviction that man must negate the moral emptiness of the universe by filling it with actions that have moral value. Sartre next took up arms in the theatre. In his first mature plays, The Flies and No Exit, the playwright-philosopher dramatized that one must assume responsibility for one's life; our choices influence the world we live in. As a political activist writing for the theatre, Sartre had discovered a way to bridge the gap between ivory-tower philosophy and everyday life. These early plays were produced almost simultaneously with the publication of his philosophical breakthrough, Being and Nothingness, in 1943. Sartre was clearly convinced that philosophizing was not enough; the theatre could be a force in changing the world. Sartre admired the ancient Greek model of a mythological theatre that always addressed contemporary politics and could move men to action. In contrast to George Stevens, who thought that WWII had foreclosed the possibility of tragedy, he saw that his own times reflected the tragic vision, “the very severity of these plays,” he said, “is in keeping with the severity of life.” Could theatre become a vehicle of freedom? In defense of French playwright Jean Anouilh's anti-Nazi adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, Sartre proclaimed that a new activist theatre was arising: Anouilh’s version of Antigone was not merely a character who rises against the state, “She represents a naked will, a pure, free choice; in her there is no distinguishing between passion and action.” Sartre participated in rehearsals for his plays, and during these rehearsals he received an education in what theatre could accomplish. His focus was on the actor, and what he shows us about ourselves. Sartre saw the actor as an existential hero. In his essays on theatre, Sartre expresses bold ideas about what an actor transmits to the spectator. An actor on stage risks everything to embody the precarious human condition, letting us reflect on how we build our lives through choices. For Sartre, the actor, much like the philosopher, demonstrates that the unexamined life is not life. In Sartre’s masterpiece No Exit, the lifeline between the actor and spectator is fused with the stage. Three characters in hell stand in judgment of one another. They pace like tigers in a cage, each unfolding the dirty laundry of the past, defending innumerable sins. They watch each other with the intensity of spectators at a theatre. The pacifist Garcin, condemned to the firing squad after fleeing a war rather than speaking out against it, cries out that history will remember him as a coward. While these characters seem paralyzed by the choices they’ve made, Sartre was quick to affirm that this play is about freedom; “the importance of freedom to us, the importance of changing acts by other acts. No matter what circle of hell we are living in, I think we are free to break out of it.” The French playwright represents un ecrivain engagé—a writer committed to political action. Sartre’s theatre still moves us because the playwright reached beyond the confines of the stage. Sartre asks us to look at ourselves. What have we made of our lives? Have we accepted the gift of freedom? We must hold ourselves accountable. We must have an impact on the world we live in. Sartre demands bravery from his audience: the courage to choose your own life in your own time.

Mark Poklemba is a recent graduate of the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training's dramaturgy program. This article originally appeared in ARTicles, the American Repertory Theatre's newsletter. What is Existentialism? By Bob Corbett, Professor Emeritus at Webster University

Existentialism. A difficult term to define and an odd movement. Odd because most thinkers whom the intellectual world categorizes as existentialists are people who deny they are that. And, two of the people whom nearly everyone points to as important to the movement, Soren Kierkegaard and Fredrich Nietzsche, are both too early in time to be in the group, thus are usually called "precursors," but studied and treated as members of the group.

Major figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus all flatly deny they are in the movement (at least at times they did), yet everyone says they are central. Secondly, the term is very difficult, if not totally impossible to define. What is existentialism? I've been asked that a thousand times, have read most intro type books on the field, have spent much of my teaching life "doing" Existentialism, yet cannot give a coherent and relatively short definition. It's sort of a spirit or aura of how one responds to human existence, much easier to characterize (rather than define) in negative terms -- what Existentialism is NOT that philosophy generally is -- than in positive terms of a definition. However, I can define certain characteristics that most Existentialists (and precursors to Existentialism) seem to share:

. They are obsessed with how to live one's life and believe that philosophical and psychological inquiry can help.

. They believe there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), and that these are special -- existential -- questions. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence, the place of God in human existence, the meaning of value, interpersonal relationship, the place of self-reflective conscious knowledge of one's self in existing. Note that the existentialists on this characterization don't pay much attention to "social" questions such as the politics of life and what "social" responsibility the society or state has. They focus almost exclusively on the individual.

. By and large Existentialists believe that life is very difficult and that it doesn't have an "objective" or universally known value, but that the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by talking about it.

. Existential choices and values are primarily demonstrated in ACT not in words.

. Given that one is focusing on individual existence and the "existential" struggles (that is, in making decisions that are meaningful in everyday life), they often find that literary characterizations rather than more abstract philosophical thinking, are the best ways to elucidate existential struggles. . They tend to take freedom of the will, the human power to do or not do, as absolutely obvious. Now and again there are arguments for free will in Existentialist literature, but even in these arguments, one gets the distinct sense that the arguments are not for themselves, but for "outsiders." Inside the movement, free will is axiomatic, it is intuitively obvious, it is the backdrop of all else that goes on.

There are certainly exceptions to each of these things, but this is sort of a placing of the existentialist-like positions. ======

Another way of doing it is much simpler. There are about a dozen major thinkers who are characterized as "Existentialist" whom most scholars agree are existentialist. Thus, Existentialism is what these thinkers hold and write. I think that in the end, this is probably the best way to understand it.

In response to a question about the above:

I want to address, at least for a first round, the question of decision making for the Existentialists. First of all there is a split among them on their concern for decisions and actions.

One of the most important thinkers in this movement, Martin Heidegger, is very little concerned with deciding and acting, but is concerned with knowing. It not what you DO that matters to Heidegger, but how you KNOW it and that you KNOW it. Jean-Paul Sartre on the other hand is profoundly concerned with acting.

However, in general the Existentialists recognize that human knowledge is limited and fallible. One can be deeply committed to truth and investigation and simply fail to find adequate truth, or get it wrong. Further, unlike science, which can keep searching for generations for an answer and afford to just say: We don't know yet, in the everyday world, we often simply must do or not do. The moment of decision comes. For the Existentialist one faces these moments of decision with a sense of fallibility and seriousness of purpose, and then RISKS. Sartre is extremely harsh on this point. At one place he says: “When I choose I choose for the whole world.” Now what can this mean? I think what Sartre is getting at is that first of all when I choose and act, I change the world in some iota. This note gets written or it doesn't. That has ramifications. It commits me to say what I'm saying. It may change someone who may be affected by my remarks. Others can be too if they hear or read them. And so on. The ripples of actions are like ripples on the sea, they go on and on and on.

By my acts I also begin to define and create the self I am, which is, to some extent a public self. Thus an act is like opening Pandora's box, it lets out what's inside the act and there is no getting it back. That's not a MORAL point to Sartre, it is an ontological fact, that is, a fact about the world. Not a should or an ought, but a description of a reality about the world and human choice.

If: 1. I am a person serious about my acts.

2. If they are as uncertain as Sartre describes 3. They are as potentially momentous as he describes Then:

It's not surprising that acting, for the Existentialist, is a terrifying responsibility and living and acting is a burden that causes great anxiety for the Existentialists. There is not absolute certainty (for some of the reasons given above and for yet more we can talk about later), thus human acts are the full responsibility of the individual.

Further, in another place in Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness, he talks about creating oneself in action. What he means by this is that I, the human, am free. I can make up my own mind about my acts. What I will BE in some final sense is what I make of myself. Thus my acts are not trivial, but definitive of my very self-hood. Again, acting in such a world of freedom, uncertainty and ontological responsibility (as opposed to moral responsibility), is so weighty that the Existentialists nearly recoil from living and acting under the terror of the weight of it all.

Put in the shortest form: Living without certainty and with personal responsibility is a nearly unbearable burden.

Bob Corbett Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Webster University St. Louis, Missouri Reprinted by permission. This and other essays can be found at Professor Corbett’s website: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/index/index.html Other People’s Hell: No Exit on Stage by Christopher Baker

“Hell is other people!” So claimed the chanticleer of existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, in his most famous work, No Exit. Born in Paris, he studied in France and Germany, taught, was imprisoned, joined the French resistance, wrote prolifically, popularized the works of Hemingway and Steinbeck in Europe, drafted screenplays, met with world leaders, supported Left-wing groups around the globe, turned down the Nobel Prize and emerged as one of the towering figures of the 20th century. As existentialism became the fashionable philosophy of colleges and cafes, dissertations and dramas, Sartre became what sounds like an oxymoron in our modern world—a philosopher with a mass following, a superstar intellectual. Though he published important philosophical treatises, his fame rests on the adeptness with which he transformed the ideas of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, taking them out of the academy and into the fictional worlds of the stage and the reality of daily life.

Locked Room No Exit was written in only a few weeks in 1940, fresh on the heels of Sartre’s success with The Flies, an anti-Nazi reworking of Euripides’ Orestes. The play is set in a drawing room into which a man and two women, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle, are escorted by a mysterious Valet after their deaths. Each lies about their reasons for ending up there, until Inez exhorts them to tell the truth: “We are in hell, my pets; they never make mistakes, and people aren’t damned for nothing.” Each confesses his or her crimes while alive: Garcin, was a pacifist journalist who fled the war and mistreated his wife, Inez seduced her cousin’s wife who killed them both and the socialite Estelle drowned her illegitimate baby. There are no mirrors in the chamber; rather each depends on the others to reflect some kind of image. But relying on others for an image of oneself is a tricky business. A complex triangle emerges in which each is both reliant and restricted by the other two. Sartre’s characters are locked into this relationship as much as they are locked into the room—each one’s imprisonment, their loss of free will depends on the other two. Though the door suddenly opens, they seem unable to leave, caught in a cycle of damnation—mutual and eternal. Sartre does, however, allow both a glimpse of hope and laughter for the three doomed souls.

On Stage Originally titled The Others, Sartre changed it to Huis clos, meaning “behind closed doors,” or, as a legal term, “in camera.” The play is most popularly known in English as No Exit. Sartre’s education in the professional theatre came by observing a master—the great actor and director Charles Dullin, who had staged Sartre’s The Flies at Paris’ Théâtre de la Cité. In writing No Exit, Sartre attempted to make his philosophical ideas active, real and actable—rather than writing philosophical speeches he wrote situations, rather than explaining he demonstrates. And, as critic Kenneth McLeish explains, “without sacrificing intellectual intensity, [Sartre allows] in sun shafts of wit and lightness of character…He is a romantic telling us a hard but reassuring message: that there is choice, and the choice is ours.” To stage the play, Sartre turned to friend Albert Camus, the actor, novelist and philosopher who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. They rehearsed in the hotel room of Sartre’s lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, founder of modern feminist thought. The exigencies of occupied France interfered, however, when one of the actresses, Olga Perret was arrested for being a member of the resistance. The play was finally produced, just before the liberation of France, in May 1944 at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, under the direction of Raymond Rouleau. The play was applauded in Paris and eventually hailed around the world, in the words of critic Eric Bentley, as one of the “chief dramatic events of the present.” By the time it reached Broadway in November 1946, the play had had over six hundred performances in Paris and had been seen in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Italy and at the Gate Theatre in London. The New York version was translated by frequent Tennessee Williams collaborator Paul Bowles and staged by Hollywood director John Huston, of Key Largo and Treasure of the Sierra Madre fame. Brooks Atkinson praised the “craftsmanship and knife-edge dexterity of the writing.” It was seen as one of the important post-war statements of existentialism, emphasizing the responsibility each human has for his or her own actions and the consequences that flow from them. It prefigured the work of other writers, particularity Ionsesco, Pinter and especially Beckett and his masterpiece Waiting for Godot.

Balancing Act Though No Exit remains one of the most well known works of modern times, it is now rarely produced, considered, perhaps, or to be too philosophical, too heavy in text, too serious. When Jerry Mouawad, co-artistic director of the Imago Theatre in Portland, Oregon staged the play in 1998, he approached the play not as a philosophical treatise but rather as Sartre intended it—an active demonstration of our relationship to other people and ourselves. By doing so he created a production that was funny, widely theatrical and sometimes off-balance—literally. “My concept of the play is a realization of the theory developed by [French mime and movement teacher] Jacques Lecoq,” said Mouawad, “that actors must recognize the dynamics of the stage. One of the Lecoq exercises asks the actors to imagine a platform. When one person steps on stage, the person opposite must compensate as if the platform might tip. The actors need to understand keeping the stage in balance.” The set is metaphor: a 17-foot square, 360-degree seesaw of a platform that must be kept in balance by the actors. Every move the actors make changes the nature of the stage—the interdependency of the characters is real. The production was re-imagined in 2005 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts with Mouawad and actors Remo Airaldi, Will LeBow, Karen and Paula Plum. They will bring Sartre’s version of hell to Hartford this fall, a funny and perilous chamber piece that tries, in the words of Sartre, to awake “the things which all men in a given epoch and community care about.”

Much of the information in this essay can be founding the following sources, which are recommended for further reading: Sartre by Ronald Hayman, The Arts in the Twentieth Century by Kenneth McLeish, Theatre and Revolution: the Culture of the French Stage by Frederick Brown and “Balancing Act The ART tips for No Exit” by Iris Fanger, Boston Phoenix, December 30, 2005. All quotations come from these sources. Sartre’s No Exit by Wallace Fowlie, from Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater.

Every literary movement has tried-and usually in a belligerent way--to adopt and assimilate and illustrate a philosophy. Sartre's case represents this phenomenon in reverse order. He is a philosopher who uses literary forms for the expression of his philosophy. Almost at its inception as a highly technical philosophy, existentialism annexed literary genres: novels, plays, essays, in order to explain itself to an ever-widening audience. Its principal literary products are literary without any doubt, and can be approached as literature. They are also demonstrations. Critical writings on Sartre and existentialism have, on the whole, been a medley of philosophical explanation and literary judgment. And they will probably remain such a medley for some time to come. M. Sartre, however, has said that it is not necessary to understand his philosophical system as such in order to read his novels and to attend performances of his plays. His doctrine, elaborate and meticulously constructed, is still unfinished. Any final judgment, either praise or condemnation, will have to be suspended, at least for a time. Meanwhile, Sartre belongs to literature in his multiple roles as novelist, dramatist, essayist, and polemical writer. His mind is as active and engaging as his pen is prolific.[…M]any critics […] have not hesitated to couple his name with that of Voltaire, and to compare his influence with that of Voltaire in the eighteenth century. The style of his writing is always close to his thinking. In reading him, one has the impression of following his thought in all of its complexity and immediacy. Writing that remains so faithful to philosophical thinking is bound to appear verbose and overabundant. Is this prolixity or richness? Such a question often comes to mind in the presence of a Sartre text. God is deliberately and doctrinally omitted from his considerations, and there is an absence of spirituality in the usual sense of the word. But there is sincerity and conviction. His characters seem separated from him and often appear more as arguments than as living human beings. But he places them in a world, in an atmosphere that is very much his own creation. There is a Sartrean "world," recognized as such in many countries of the real world today, and this is the result of a vigorous productive temperament, of an intellect and a sensibility that have redefined and agitated some of the eternal problems of humanity. …

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Traditionally in France, the theater is looked upon as a domain that the leader of a new movement is anxious to capture and utilize. This was true for Voltaire in the eighteenth century and for Hugo in the nineteenth. Without being a professional dramatist, in the sense that Jean Anouilh is a dramatist, Sartre has used the theatrical form with considerable ease and naturalness and spontaneity. His thought about the great problems that his philosophy raises, such as man's solitude, and freedom and responsibility, has a greater clarity in the plays than in the other forms of his writing. […] One feels that the writing of his dialogue has been accomplished without effort because it is dominated by the very clarity of the subject matter as he sees it. But this dialogue, in its freshness, spontaneity, liveliness, is dramatic in itself, and because of these very qualities. One follows so many ideas, as they multiply rapidly in scene after scene, that they hold our full attention and we end by not missing, in any serious sense, the psychological hesitations and subtleties, and the dramatic insights of poetic metaphor that are pervasively present in such playwrights as Shakespeare, Pirandello, and Claude. So substantial is the intellectual nourishment of a Sartre play, that we forget what it lacks. When Les Mouches (The Flies) was first put on in 1943, under the direction of Charles Dullin, at the Théatre Sarah Bernhardt, Sartre was known to a fairly limited public for his volume of stories Le Mur and his novel La Nausée. He was writing at that time his treatise L'Etre et le Néant. His new treatment of the fable of Orestes seemed to the public of 1943 to bear a strong relationship to the moral dilemma of the Occupation. The Parisians went to the theater not only to see a new play but also to feel united one with the other in this interpretation of the daily drama they were living through. The theme of the Resistance was far less obvious to the public that attended the revival in 1951. …

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Three characters, a man and two women, find themselves in hell, which for them is a living room with Second Empire furniture. Each of the characters needs the other two in order to create some illusion about himself. Since existence, for Sartre, is the will to project oneself into the future--to create one's future--the opposite of existence, where man has no power to create his future, his hell. This is the meaning of the Sartrean hell in the morality play No Exit. Garcin's sin had been cowardice, and in hell he tries to use the two women, who are locked up forever with him in the same room, under the same strong light, as mirrors in which he will see a complacent and reassuring picture of himself. This play, an example of expert craftsmanship so organized that the audience learns very slowly the facts concerning the three characters, is Sartre's indictment of the social comedy and the false role that each man plays in it. The most famous utterance in the play, made by Garcin, when he says that hell is other people, l'enfer, c'est les autres, is, in the briefest form possible, Sartre's definition of man's fundamental sin. When the picture a man has of himself is provided by those who see him, in the distorted image of himself that they give back to him, he has rejected what the philosopher has called reality. He has, moreover, rejected the possibility of projecting himself into his future and existing in the fullest sense. In social situations we play a part that is not ourself. If we passively become that part, we are thereby avoiding the important decisions and choices by which personality should be formed. After confessing her sins to Garcin, Inès acknowledges her evil and concludes with a statement as significant as Garcin's definition of hell. She needs the suffering of others in order to exist. (Moi, je suis méchante: ça veut dire que j'ai besoin de la souffrance des autres pour exister. . . .) The game a man plays in society, in being such and such a character, is pernicious in that he becomes caught in it. L'homme s'englue is a favorite expression of Sartre. The viscosity (viscosité) of such a social character is the strong metaphor by which Sartre depicts this capital sin and which will end by making it impossible for man to choose himself, to invent himself freely. The drawing-room scene in hell, where there is no executioner because each character tortures the other two, has the eeriness of a Gothic tale, the frustration of sexuality, the pedagogy of existentialist morality. The least guilty of the three seems to be Garcin, and he suffers the most under the relentless intellectualizing and even philosophizing of Inès. At the end of the play, Garcin complains of dying too early. He did not have time to make his own acts. (Je suis mort trop tôt. On ne m'a pas laissé le temps de faire mes actes.) Inès counters this (she has an answer to everything, Garcin is going to say) with the full Sartrean proclamation: “You are nothing else but your life.” (Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie. . . .) No further argument seems possible after this sentence, and the play ends three pages later when the full knowledge of their fate enters the consciousness of the three characters and Garcin speaks the curtain line: Eh bien, continuous. . . . (“Well, well, let's get on with it. . . .”). This ultimate line which, paradoxically, announces the continuation of the same play, was to be echoed ten years later in the concluding line of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The two plays bear many resemblances both structurally and philosophically.

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The plays of Sartre have the dynamics of existentialist exercises. In them he tracks down the alibis we make in our daily lives and flails the system of routines by which so much is carried out in history. The fear of standing alone forces us to these routines, exemplified in the plays by fear in the people of Argos (Les Mouches), by the static quality of hell (Huis clos), by the goal of security in the bourgeois world (Les Mains sales).

Excerpted from Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater, by Wallace Fowlie, Meridian, 1960. Ed’s Page

After the Play: 1. Why doesn’t Garcin leave when the door opens? Before the Play: 2. What does a mirror symbolize? Why 1. What do you think happens after death? does Estelle need to look at herself in the Describe what the afterlife might look mirror, and why do you think mirrors are like. absent from the room? 2. What does the word “truth” mean to 3. Why does the Valet have no eyelids? you? Does the truth determine a Why does this bother Garcin? What is person’s destiny? different from the Valet’s gaze to that of 3. Sartre’s No Exit is categorized as an Inez? absurdist play. Keeping this in mind, 4. Why does time pass more quickly on how do you foresee the play being earth than it does in hell? presented? Will there be a traditional 5. What is self-deception, and what role plotline? What might the set/costumes does it play in No Exit? look like?

Did you like how the play ended? Why or why not? How did the lighting, set, and costuming in this production help to tell the story? Choose one of the three production Now it’s your turn to elements (lighting, set, or costume) and become a become a playwright: designer. What might you design differently from Write a new ending to what you saw in this production? What colors the play. might you choose? Also, think about texture and mood.

A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation What is Sartre’s opinion on the of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent existence of mankind? Find universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and examples of his existential stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the viewpoints in No Exit. consequences of one's acts. Image Credits http://www.ilovephilosophy.com http://www.odysseetheater.com/sartre/sartre_zeittafel.htm http://www.stern.de/unterhaltung/buecher/:Jean-Paul-Sartre-Der-Ekel- Existenzialismus/542032.html