A Dying Monarchy

The kingdom lies in ruins, a pitifully reduced scrap of its former glory. The fallow Earth trembles in continual paroxysm. Mars and Saturn have collided, the sun is burning out, and the Milky Way has commenced curdling.

Yet none of these cataclysmic portents penetrate the comically callow consciousness of the King (John C. Reilly). Once omnipotent, the King has lost his powers over the elements--but as long as he feels, sees and breathes, life remains sweet. However, the prospect of self-annihilation, the sure and certain knowledge that he is going to die, sparks a last-ditch resistance as furious as it is ineffectual.

Eugene Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” a co-production between Top Drawer Entertainment and the Actors’ Gang at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, is a side-splitting yet poignant portrait of individual hubris and universal futility. For Ionesco’s solipsistic King, now reduced to laughable insignificance, the end of his own life really does signal the collapse of the known universe.

An epic of gallows humor, Ionesco’s lengthy classic presents challenges not evident in his more famous and pointed one-acts--how, after all, to sustain a joke over more than two hours. This production features a crackling translation by Charles Marowitz and Donald Watson, which mitigates any potential turgidity, and keen direction by Patrick Murphy, who extracts comic gold from Ionesco’s absurdist rabbit hole.

As is the case in any rabbit hole, it’s all a question of digging and delving--for the precise pacing, the right subtext. In this endeavor, the performances range from the inspired to the merely industrious. Using his scepter as a crutch for some of the funniest pratfalls since Keaton, the baby-faced, hilarious Reilly plays the King with a trembling lip and a calculating eye, gauging possible escape routes as inexorable Fate closes in.

Jason Reed’s Guard is an amiable doofus whose clockwork movements have just the right fillip of playfulness. And Ezra Buzzington, in his drag turn as the harried Juliette, the kingdom’s sole remaining factotum, brings down the house with his simple line, “I polish the parquet floors”--brilliantly effective internalization, and not bad timing either.

Molly Bryant projects regal grace as Queen Marguerite, the King’s domineering first wife, but Evie Peck plays his sex-kittenish second missus with an unvaryingly strained grimace, while Michael Rivkin never adequately plumbs the possibilities of the Doctor.

Still, this is a near optimum realization of Ionesco’s slapstick Armageddon. Considering his own obsessive preoccupation with death, Ionesco’s humorous take is touchingly gallant, a clear-eyed wink in the dark and a nudge in the ribs of catastrophe that both amuses--and humbles.

BE THERE

“Exit the King,” Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 31. $20. (323) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.