Rhinoceroses run rampant in Asolo’s absurdist allegory

It’s a 60-year-old play about French people who inexplicably turn into pachyderms.

But people who know the play say it couldn’t be more meaningful and immediate for contemporary American audiences.

The play is “Rhinoceros,” Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist farce. It’s next up from Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota.

“I’m assigning it to some of my students,” said Valerie Lipscomb, associate professor of English at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. “I’m having them see the Asolo production. It is that foundational of theater of the absurd.”

The 1959 play concerns a small French town where, gradually, almost all the inhabitants turn into rhinoceroses. It’s been seen as Ionesco’s statement to the acquiescence of many Europeans to rise of Fascism and Naziism. But since it is nonspecific and symbolic, its meaning is not tied to any one moment in history. Scholars say it’s as relevant now as it was then.

“I don’t think Ionesco had any concept of how prescient he was being with this play,” said Dean Anthony, associate professor of theater at State College of Florida. “This was obviously very much pre-internet, and now group thought gets spread so much more quickly than it did then.”

Most of the the townspeople who turn into rhinoceroses in the play, Anthony said, tend to talk in cliches and trite phrases, with no thought behind them. They’re the first to succumb to the illogical local trend of transforming into wild animals.

Anthony sees parallels to today’s political debates, in which people argue with memes instead of sentences, and to the United States Congress, where Republicans who once condemned and ridiculed Donald Trump, the candidate, now fall in line with anything he does.

But it’s not a polemic, and it’s certainly open to interpretation, so it’s not likely to offend any audience member’s sensibilities. In fact, one of the beauties of Ionesco’s work is that people in the audience will relate to Berenger, the one townsman who does not transform.

But in reality, most of us are rhinoceroses.

Even though the play is absurdist and far from straightforward, Lipscomb its not hard to understand. It doesn’t require a background in the vocabulary of theater of the absurd.

“It’s about how we react when something inhuman is going on around us,” she said.

It’s also a highly entertaining play, a comedy despite its serious undertones and tragic elements, that has snorting, stampeding rhino-humans running amok through a French village.

“How can you not laugh?” Lipscomb said.

The Asolo production is directed by Tony Award-winner (and Academy Award nominee) Frank Galati. Galati has shortened the play from three acts to two, a more comfortable length for contemporary audiences.

Galati got in some hot water a few years back when he shortened Brain Friel’s “Philadelphia Here I Come” without the playwright’s permission. The show had to be canceled, and the parts that had been edited out were restored and rehearsed before it reopened.

This time, the cuts were made with the permission of Ionesco’s estate.

“In streamlining the script, it was my goal to make the play land with a contemporary audience,” Galati said. “I hope that this swift new production will galvanize our audiences and bring renewed interest in this brilliant, timely play and in Ionesco’s value in the history of world theater.”

Details: Feb. 9-April 14 (in repertory), Mertz Theatre at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. $14-$90. 941-351-8000, asolorep.org.

This story was originally published February 2, 2018 at 5:11 PM with the headline "Rhinoceroses run rampant in Asolo’s absurdist allegory."