Spend an Existentialist Eternity in Cary's Page-Walker Hotel with Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit

Cary's Page-Walker Hotel building, now home to the city's arts and history center, celebrates its sesquicentennial this year. It's a nice place to visitbut you wouldn't want to spend eternity there. Should you doubt it, consider the three characters who face that very fate in a private, tasteful hell, tucked away on the building's third floor. In Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre's classic existential drama, no fire and brimstone await a trio condemned for their specific sins. Instead, they gradually learn how uniquely suited they are to torture one another in perpetuity, just by being themselves. In short, it's the embodiment of Sartre's famous dictum, "Hell is other people." Raleigh theater veteran Kurt Benrud directs Joanna Vickery Herath, Melanie Simmons, and Thom Haynes for Cary Playwrights Forum and Pequod Productions.