A rhinoceros runs through a town.
That’s the inciting incident of Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco, showing at DPAC through Sunday, October 8th. And it was so real and so relevant, that it felt like a punch in the gut.
A rhinoceros is shocking until it isn’t. Learning that it is people that are turning into them is shocking, until you bend over backwards to justify their choices. But when the rhinoceroses are the majority, it becomes easier to fall in with them than to stand firm in your humanity.
So….it’s relevant.
The play was first performed Paris in 1960, and performed here with Notre Dame-Saint Mary’s Theater in 1968. The issue of standing firm in your principles in the face of herds of rhinoceroses was prominent in the memory of the public. Did I say herds of rhinoceroses? I meant fascism. As far as Ionesco is concerned, they’re the same thing. But the team behind Rhinoceros made sure to bring the play, already uncomfortably timely, into the present day.
With the guidance of director Abigail Schnell, it all started with changing a few pronouns. The character of Dudard, in the original scripted as a man, was rewritten as a female character. Notably, the play does not back off from the romance with Daisy and the platonic friendship with Berenger in doing so, because it is 2017. Dudard’s costume was a monochromatic red dress and suit jacket, and as she and Daisy dealt with workplace sexism, the similarities to a woman in politics with a penchant for monochromatic pantsuits was clear, at least to me. In regard to the original script, the mansplaining of a coworker, Botard, got a strong reaction, especially from the women in the audience, because we all knew the rhinoceros was real. Characters denied their existence until they started destroying the town, and ignored the word of anyone who claims that there were rhinoceroses in the streets.
Some things just become more clear when we talk about a rhinoceros. I mean, that’s the point of metaphors in literature, but this one was painful to live through. It is so obvious to the audience that the humans are becoming something they are not meant to be. Rhinoceroses are not ‘singing’ as the tempted characters state they are. Rhinoceroses roar and are speaking a completely different language than the humans. They cannot be communicated with, so compromise is impossible. Some differences cut too deep, which parallels so much of the “many sides” issue today. As the play states, to be a rhinoceros is to give up human morality in favor of mob mentality and rage under the guise of freedom. In case any member of the audience missed the metaphor, when the rhinoceroses take the stage for the final time, they are holding tiki torches, carrying the full weight of the Charlottesville white supremacy rally with them.
The audience’s clarity is shared with only Berenger, who briefly falters because it would be so much easier to join with his neighbors, friends, and love, and become a rhinoceros. But he snaps out of it, ending the play on a determined, important note:
“I’ll take on the whole of them! I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them! I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end! I’m not capitulating!”
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