Trying To Make A Graceful Exit

In his satirical post entitled "Life Is A Comedy," Chas Gillespie posits that:

• Life is an absurdist tragicomedy written by a freakishly ambitious haunted house actor and directed by a bored sadist with a nightmare fetish who spent a summer during college in Paris and won’t shut up about it.
• Life is a comedy written by a madman and enacted by a troupe of tragically untalented amateur actors high on morphine for an audience that isn’t paying attention.
• Life is a comedy written by a sadist obsessed with tragedy.

Strangely enough, one's perspective on life changes as one ages. During adolescence and youth, life is frequently looked upon as a grand adventure. For much of one's middle years, life is a period filled with work, responsibility, child-rearing, and financial challenges. As John Kander and Fred Ebb noted in their opening number from 1968's Zorba, "Life is what you do while you're waiting to die."


Several short films screened during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival approach death and dying from unique perspectives. Maris Curran's touching short entitled While I Yet Live focuses on the bonds which a community of African-American women in Gee's Bend, Alabama.

Since the early 1800s, these women have used scraps of cloth from cornmeal sacks, old clothing, and anything else they could find to create colorful quilts that could keep their families warm. One notes that the reason her five brothers were taught how to cook for themselves was "in case they couldn't find a woman who would marry them." Another remains filled with a sense of wonder that some of the quilts she created -- which have been featured in such books as The Quilts of Gee's Bend, Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, and Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts, and Beyond, and inspired an Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary entitled The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend -- have been displayed in Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they have brought much happiness to complete strangers.

A six-minute stop-motion short from France created by Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata does an exquisite job of demonstrating how a child learns a ritual from his father that will be repeated many times throughout his life. In Negative Space, a man who travels frequently for work teaches his little boy how to pack a suitcase. At first, the young boy watches and listens as his father explains the precise methodology which allows someone to fit everything he needs into one suitcase. By the time he is 12, the boy is packing his father's suitcase before each trip and eagerly awaiting a congratulatory text from his Dad that says "Perfect." Years later, when his father dies, the son goes to the funeral home and, when he sees his father's body displayed in an open coffin, is shocked at how much wasted space remains in the box. It's no wonder that this tiny gem was nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Here's the trailer:


Created by Laura Gonçalves and Xá, a black-and-white animated short entitled Drop By Drop shows how inhabitants of a Portuguese village watch their birthplace fade in importance as its elders die and their children move to urban areas. As the community shrinks and (due to climate change) the waters around it continue to rise, they try to keep the memories of their village afloat, refusing to let their home be lost to oblivion.


In what can best be described as a black comedy, a middle-aged man and his stepmother visit a funeral director at his place of business in Oakland. The person they are turning to for comfort and support as they plan for a dying relative's demise is beyond strange. Making his entrance from the bathroom as he's pulling up his pants, the funeral director welcomes them into a room filled with Christian-themed paraphernalia. As he begins to fill out the necessary forms, he exclaims "Wow, we've never had a Jew before!"

When the dying man's son is asked if his father has a favorite saying that might be used during the service, the question doesn't bring the rosiest type of memory to mind. Just to be sure, the son calls the hospital and tries to get a coherent answer out of his old man. At the end of Mario Furloni and Kate McLean's 11-minute short, the screen is dedicated to the memory of Marty, with the dates 1958-2017 and an epitaph that reads "Loved cheesecake."

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Obituaries, tombstones, fan clubs, and and historical re-enactments can go a long way toward keeping the memories of loved ones and past events alive from one generation to another. However, in an age when Confederate statues are being torn down and removed, a short film like Sierra Pettengill's sobering Graven Image is bound to stir deep emotions.

Pettengill combed through more than 100 years of archival footage to explore the origins, creation, and bizarre legal status of the largest Confederate monument. Funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and built on the site where the second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915, the rock relief on the north side of Stone Mountain depicts Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson riding astride their favorite horses.

The famous Stone Mountain Carving
(Photo courtesy of New Georgia Encyclopedia)

In 1964, the UDOC donated the Flag Terrace in the park below Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain is a memorial, Georgia state law requires that the Confederate flags remain in place and must not be removed. Although the actual carving wasn't completed until March 3, 1972, the history surrounding Stone Mountain (and what it stands for) has become an increasingly sore spot in contemporary American culture.

Following August 2017's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams called for the removal of Stone Mountain's carving. However, George state law specifies that:

"Any other provision of law notwithstanding, the memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause."

Pettingill's 11-minute documentary does an unnerving job of holding a mirror up to history in a way that will provoke radically different responses from viewers depending on their feelings about the Civil War, Southern Heritage, the legacy of the Confederate States of America, and the Civil Rights movement. Check it out:

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While San Francisco has long had a fondness for works from the Theatre of the Absurd, I was not aware that during the past 32 years, EXIT Theatre has staged 24 productions of works by the French playwright, Eugene Ionesco (which may surpass the track record of any other theatre in the United States). My first encounter with Ionesco's work was back in 1961, when I attended a performance of Rhinoceros starring Zero Mostel, Anne Jackson, and Eli Wallach with Morris Carnovsky and Jean Stapleton in supporting roles. Although there was much about the play that, as a high school student, I did not understand, watching Mostel transform into an angry rhinoceros in front of an audience without using any props was an unforgettable lesson in the transformative power of live theatre.

Last month, the EXIT Theatre mounted a new production of Exit The King (the third play in Ionesco's "Berenger" series), which received its world premiere in 1962. Unlike many of the playwright's more absurdist works, Exit The King is blunt about its plot and the specific timing of its events. The play is all about the death of King Berenger (Don Wood). Early in the action, his first wife, Queen Marguerite (Christina Augello), tells the king that he will die at the end of the play and gives the approximate amount of time he has yet to live.

Christina Augello (Queen Marguerite) and Mikka Bonel (Queen Marie)
in a scene from Exit The King (Photo by: Jay Yamada)

Despite the character's unavoidable death sentence, there is plenty of time for King Berenger and the members of his court to indulge in some jealous banter and self-serving soliloquies. Written when Ionesco was ill and feeling especially vulnerable, it presents audiences with an exercise in how to deal with the fact that your life will soon come to an end.

Ionesco's Berenger characters tend to be fairly naive versions of Everyman. His inspiration for writing Exit The King was simple: He was terrified of death. "This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying,” he confessed. “I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me to be the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die."

Don Wood stars in Exit The King (Photo by: Jay Yamada)

With costumes by Lindsay Eifert, lighting by Amanda Ortmayer, and an imposing unit set designed by Mary Naughton, Stuart Bousel directed the production using Donald Watson's translation. In supporting roles, Christina Augello had some strong moments as Queen Marguerite, the King's first wife and his court's only realist. As his second wife, Queen Marie, Mikka Bonel went to great efforts to convince everyone that the King's imminent death was really all about her. As the Doctor, Justin Lucas tended to ham things up (much to the delight of a handful of squealing fans in the audience.) Others in the cast included Ron Talbot as The Guard and Valerie Fachman as Juliette.

Justin Lucas as The Doctor in Exit The King (Photo by: Jay Yamada)

Academic curiosity was primarily what drew me to the EXIT Theatre to attend this performance.  Because I was feeling less than my best that night, I had some difficulty remaining focused on Ionesco's  play. While that may have been due to the translation; I suspect it was mostly due to the acting.