THEATER REVIEW : ‘Exiles’ Questions Identity and Reality

Two men, their bare chests covered with tattoos, stare straight ahead in a sparsely furnished flat. One of them recites a poem as a young woman enters. Wordlessly she glides to the other man, who kisses and then strangles her.

“Exiles,” the one-act by French playwright Enzo Cormann at City Garage in Santa Monica, begins with this troubling and perplexing sequence of events. It ends, less than an hour later, with one of the men repeatedly screaming, “Mother!”

Did we mention that Cormann is French?

“Exiles” could easily be dismissed as existential nonsense, but director Frederique Michel’s brooding production has a way of getting under your skin and staying there. Even when the play dances on the edge of self-parody--and it frequently does--Michel and his powerful trio of actors raise unsettling questions of identity and reality.

The men--dubbed You (Stephen Pocock) and Me (Andrew Cooper Wasser)--are clearly meant as doppelgangers, two sides of the same person. But who is that person? Perhaps Carl Sturm, a German poet living in Paris, or perhaps some figment of Sturm’s overheated imagination. And what of the mysterious She (Gabriela Tollman), who could be a publishing secretary, Sturm’s erstwhile mistress or even his mother?

Cormann, touted as an exemplar of the new French theater, appears to have been influenced not only by Beckett and other absurdist playwrights but also by Robbe-Grillet, whose coldly detached “anti-novels” of the 1950s experimented with the unknowability of . . . well, everything.

Charles Duncombe’s deftly minimalist lighting and set design top the impressive technical credits.

“Exiles” is running on a single bill after the company closed a companion piece, Nathalie Sarraute’s “Just for Nothing.”

* “Exiles,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 (alley) 4th St . , Santa Monica. Wednesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 13. $7.50. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 55 minutes.