No exit
By Jean Paul Sartre (1944), 1987
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, three damned souls wait to enter hell. Rather than encountering elements and devices of torture as they expect, they enter a plain room: for this set, a common classroom with no windows and two entrance doors. Grey cubes were scattered in the space and fixed to the walls were newspaper sheets stamped with a sponge pattern in black ink. After the audience arrived, the doors of the room slammed shut and locked. The confined spectators sat embedded in the scene and were made to feel the oppression experienced by the damned souls. I designed two sets for this play; the second set (seen in the sketch presented below) was a non-representational touring set for a 1987 theater festival in Rio Grande do Sul.
No Exit, set design sketch
Suspended white frame, a gesso mask, and cubes were the props for the set.
The set was made of tulle applied to both sides of a wooden frame.
A cube transversely cut with its sides open, apart from each other, was grounded on the floor of the stage. It demonstrates an early emergence of my diagonal discourse.