Have you ever been in a social situation where everyone seemed to behave according to script, playing expected parts that seemed to contain no honest expression of themselves?

Have you ever witnessed entire lives built around those social scripts — passive lives devoid of personality and built on avoidance of necessary decisions and choices? The reluctance to shape one's future can be a good defense but the worst torment.

In "No Exit," Jean-Paul Sartre confines three people in a windowless room. They have recently died and believe themselves to be in Hell. There are no fires and tortures, only each other.

Before the short play's end, the trio understands that Hell is other people.

The characters see themselves only as reflected by their companions — distorted illusions that create a Hell in which people lack the ability to act freely.

Written in 1944, "No Exit" is Sartre's dramatic expression of existentialism, which requires people to responsibly exercise free will, even without being certain of what is right or wrong.

That's a heavy message to deliver in the 11 p.m. slot at the Earle Ernst Lab Theatre, and director Kris Fitzgerald approaches it literally and suggestively.

The lines are intact, and the characters move through stages of recognition and discovery. We sense their frustration, but their private hell of facing eternity without the chance to shape it is not strongly projected.

It may be that Fitzgerald's staging choices confuse our focus. Dressed in white, the three characters each carry a small black puppet, which is at once the most intriguing and distracting element.

Looking like miniature charred mummies, the puppets suggest the characters' souls, and the contrast between living actors and the inanimate lumps of coal is striking. But when the puppets interact with each other, while the actors speak their lines, our attention drifts. Which is the primary spokesman — actor or puppet?

Unfortunately, the puppets get some lines that would be better delivered by the humans. This additional red herring in a play already steeped in ambiguity is a distraction that blurs the action.

This "No Exit" is only superficially interesting — the text would be better studied than spoken.