'Exit strategies'

CAMBRIDGE -- Jerry Mouawad calls ''No Exit," Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 one-act set in hell, ''a great play but not a good play." It's a landmark of existentialism, but it's verbose and repetitive. It's frequently cited but rarely staged. And it has a famous line -- ''Hell is other people" -- that doesn't quite mean what you think.

Those challenges are what Mouawad, the co-artistic director of Imago Theatre in Portland, Ore., took on when he created his own production, which starts previews tomorrow at the American Repertory Theatre. Mouawad originally staged this version at Imago, cutting the verbiage and designing an ingeniously precarious set. Here, he's working with the local cast -- ART veterans Remo Airaldi, Will LeBow, Karen MacDonald, and Paula Plum -- to make the piece even leaner and meaner.

On a recent rehearsal day, Mouawad and his cast take a break to gather around a table at the ART's Loeb Drama Center and talk about their work. Looming nearby is Mouawad's unique set, a platform balanced on a central pivot that shifts angles -- sometimes subtly, sometimes alarmingly -- with every step the actors take. Mouawad designed the platform to reflect and amplify the shifting power relationships among Sartre's denizens of hell: the cowardly Garcin (LeBow), the manipulative Inez (Plum), the seductive Estelle (MacDonald), and the infernally impish valet (Airaldi) who ushers them into the inescapable room where, they gradually realize, they are to serve as each other's eternal tormentors.

With that platform lurking in the background, it's hard to avoid noticing the subtle shifts of focus and control that occur in any human interaction. As the actors and director talk, first one and then another takes center stage; the balance shifts when LeBow is summoned upstairs for a costume fitting, or when Robert Woodruff, the ART's artistic director, arrives midafternoon to offer some insights.

Woodruff has been working with the actors on the psychological layers of the text, leaving Mouawad free to concentrate on the precise choreography that his stage design requires. It's a slightly unusual division of labor, but the actors and directors seem to have found their own balancing points.

One misunderstanding about the play, Mouawad begins, is that it's much funnier than people think. The actors agree -- though LeBow suggests that it may be even funnier to a French audience.

''Maybe for the French, it's 'The Odd Couple,' " he jokes. ''Garcin -- he's the slob!"

He's interrupted by an ART staffer, summoning him to the fitting. ''Answer for me the way I would," LeBow tells his colleagues, and he leaves. Onstage, he won't have such an easy way out.

''So," a visitor asks, ''is hell other people?"

Mouawad takes the ball. ''The line is misinterpreted as 'Other people bug me,' " he says. ''But what he meant is 'When you experience yourself through other people, you're going to live in hell.' " Mouawad notes that Sartre and the most significant of his others, Simone de Beauvoir, ''weren't the nicest people in their lives," so they could indeed have created a kind of shared hell on earth.

''The two of them were very alpha," MacDonald interjects.

''What's 'alpha' mean?" asks Mouawad.

''Dogs," Plum explains. ''One of them always has to dominate, to be the leader."

Mouawad nods, shifting the focus back. ''They always had a third to triangulate and to torture and to dominate each other with," he says, just as, in ''No Exit," Inez and Garcin use Estelle against each other. In a famous pact, Sartre and de Beauvoir agreed to be unfaithful -- on the condition that they confide everything about their infidelities, which they did in sometimes suffocating detail.

''In a weird way, the piece is almost a confessional," Mouawad says of the play.

So where does that leave Estelle, merely a pawn in the Sartre/de Beauvoir surrogates' games?

She's ''a very sweet person on the way to alpha," Plum says of MacDonald's role. They laugh. Estelle ''does have power, as the person that they both want," Plum says. ''I can't quite imagine people living their lives this way. . . . You draw back and kind of realize, 'This is hell. But they still have a need to put on masks and play roles. Why?' They're still in hell."

''We all do," Mouawad puts in. ''We all put on masks, for protection or because we're afraid of what someone will say. We have to work together. So you put on a mask, the persona that's most successful for you."

''But they're in hell," Airaldi says. ''You got a big fat F in life! There's no 'incomplete' in hell."

Everyone laughs, and Mouawad goes on to talk about the staging. Because the platform has no walls, he says, ''there's some paradoxes going on. It's a closed space, but open all around them. And the tipping -- there's a sense of danger, that they're going to fall off. It has a cinematic effect when you watch it: 'We're going to this angle now, this angle now.' "

Is the shifting balance deliberately reflecting shifts in power among the characters?

''Sometimes it is," he says. ''But why is it tipping here? Well, it's tipping because you walked over there. But that happens in life, too. If I went over here" -- he stands up from the table and walks a dozen feet away -- ''my words are different here. Other people have to counter to maintain balance. Or, if you don't do something, you're going to change balance. We're all aware of it. We're superperceptive as human beings. The stage is heightening that: Look, everything you do is affecting someone else."

''One of the things that makes it hard for us," Plum says, ''is that we have to be very discreet in every move we make."

''You can't move on impulse," MacDonald chimes in. ''It's a very highly choreographed piece."

''I really hate working this way," Mouawad exclaims. Usually, he explains, he lets movement evolve in rehearsal. But on the shifting platform he has to map out every move in advance, and, Mouawad says, ''I can't stand it. I like working organically, finding the impulse. When I first staged it, conceptually it went this way. I did all the preliminary staging in my head, and -- I'm talking too much."

''No, you're not," Plum says.

''I don't like to repeat myself," Mouawad says. ''I hate repetition. I can't escape it in this show. I am trapped in 'No Exit!' "

Everyone laughs again. And then LeBow returns from his fitting, and Mouawad gets up to leave while the actors do a ''line-through" on their own. Later, he and Woodruff will return to watch them work, and the balance will shift again. Right now, though, it's just four actors, four people running through their lines, four characters, alone, in a room.

The American Repertory Theatre and Imago Theatre present ‘‘No Exit’’ tomorrow through Jan. 29 at the Loeb Drama Center. Tickets: $15-74. 617-547-8300, www.amrep.org

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.