Theater Review: Absurd ‘Rhinoceros' Stampedes the Stage

Trumpeting rhinoceroses are interrupting the peace of a perfectly odd French town sometime in the early part of the 20th century, trampling over pets and striking fear into the minds of innocent cafe-goers. And then something stranger is discovered. The rhinos look uncannily familiar-they are townspeople, transformed by what the dwindling human population can only explain as "rhinoceritis."

It may sound like something out of a bad WB pilot, but Eugene Ionesco's 1958 play "Rhinoceros" is a masterful study of tolerance and conformity, draped on the stage as a metaphor for fascism. Ionesco, a Romanian who died in 1994 at the age of 84, based "Rhinoceros" on journals he kept before and during World War II, when he wrote that a friend stopped becoming a man and changed before his eyes into an animal fit for a world in which rhinoceroses take power and live by "rhinoceros ethics, a rhinoceros philosophy, a rhinoceros universe."

The Berkeley Rep's production, which opened last week, takes Ionesco's "Theater of the Absurd" classic and makes it nearly magical, as magical as something this haunting and disturbing can be.

Thanks to director Barbara Damashek, "Rhinoceros" has enough comedic twists and visual delights to make the play itself hypnotic, utterly believable in all its impossibility. The transformations become expected, and the remaining humans become the freaks, unwieldy, crazed and paranoid, much like those who resisted Nazism were made out to be. The highbrow farce in Rhinoceros allows all this heavy background material to seep into the viewer's consciousness practically unnoticed, again a stroke of Ionesco's genius, again a metaphor for how brainwashing works.

The problem, though, is textual unevenness. Whether for fault of his translators (in this case Allen Kuharski and Georges Moskos) or Ionesco himself, the text is excruciating in some places, too obvious and sometimes too pedantic. This is mostly apparent in the play's first act, where everyone accuses everyone else of "missing the point" in pointless, going-nowhere exchanges delivered at a pace that can induce teeth grinding-but then that may be the desired effect.

The reward for sitting through this, however, is "Rhinoceros's" chilling second act, which carries the production's most startling visual sequences. Jarion Monroe (Jean) gives us a wrenching scene of a rhino-transformation in action. Monroe's rhino scene previews the climactic transformation attempt of protagonist Berenger, who has a rhino identity crisis. Berkeley Rep favorite Geoff Hoyle is genius of physicality, and as his Berenger teeters on the brink of madness, one wonders as he does: "Is there this animal in all of us?"

The question is weighty and tragic but also somehow funny, like something out of Chekhov's nightmares. By play's end, the sloping triangular gray stage floor that at first was so obviously evocative of a rhinoceros horn has become an inconspicuous part of the scenery, so to speak-as much a fact of life in "Rhinoceros" as the pack of rhinos that lay siege upon Berenger's devastated home to the sounds of drums in crescendo.

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