I’m back! After weeks of vacation I am happy to review one of the best productions mounted by American Repertory Theater:RHINOCEROS by Eugene Ionesco starring two of our finest actors, John Turturro and Paul Giamatti. Together, they ride the rhythms of Ionesco’s “absurdist” play adapted by the A.R.T. to underscore the obvious: absurdity is as normal as apple pie these days–and every day. Therein lies the humor and the horror.
John Turturro in “Rhinoceros” Credit: Hawver and Hall
The play directed by Diane Paulus– the last she’ll helm at the Loeb Drama Center before moving to the new space–opens with Turturro, loose and lanky as everyman Berenger, hungover and sprawling outside a cafe. As he struggles to sit up, his first words bemoaning his exhaustion with life, make us laugh and cut to the quick of the human condition.
It’s an apt new opening scene adapted from Ionesco’s Fragments of a Journal and a roadmap to the thematic landscape we’re entering. Berenger is soon joined by Paul Giamatti, well cast as Jean an intellectual bully who berates Berenger as a coward and drunkard, and prescribes will power and “cultural events” including “avant-garde” theater like “Ionesco” as the way to take on life!
Paul Giamatti and John Turturro in “Rhinoceros” Credit:Hawver and Hall
They are funny as hell together as they sit squabbling in a cafe over the meaning of life, the interchange revealing the futility of language, logic, and meaning itself.
BERENGER [to Jean]: Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.
JEAN [to Berenger]: You contradict yourself. What oppresses you – solitude, or the company of others? You consider yourself a thinker, yet you’re devoid of logic.
Their world is outlined onstage by a cafe, grocery store, and steepled church which look like storybook images floating in Jen Schriever’s eerily lit, deep dark void of a set by Riccardo Hernandez. A grocer (Peter Francis James) and his wife (Kristine Nielsen), a waiter (Clay Singer), and a housewife (Harriette D. Foy) clutching her precious cat populate the scene– when it is suddenly interrupted by the gathering sound of hooves and a cloud of dust –signaling a rhinoceros tearing through the town square (haunting sound and special effects by Fitz Patton and Markus Maurette)! It seems people all around them are turning into monsters- literally.
Talk about a working metaphor! Ionesco gives these beasts plenty to carry. Inspired by the Nazi takeover of Romania where the French-Romanian Ionesco was born and lived many of his formative years, these blind, brutal beasts are thick-skinned fascists leading the charge anywhere fascists thrive and conformists– out of fear, failed logic, or stupidity–follow.
The first response to this crazy event is tepid. The townspeople merely take note and Berenger and Jean exclaim,”Well, of all things!” Even when the housewife’s pussy cat is trampled, it’s telling that the audience, at first, laughs. Harriette D. Foy’s perfectly hysterical reaction as the kitty’s owner is partly to blame: there’s method in her madness, and Paulus’s direction.
Tatiana Maslany and John Turturro in “Rhinoceros” credit: Hawver and Hall
Our horror is meant to come in increments –and it is solidified when Giamatti in a bravura scene undergoes the inevitable and ironic metamorphosis from smug, refined intellectual touting discipline and will-power, to a wild-eyed, snorting quadruped, shedding his clothes and bellowing a new creed from behind the bathroom door:
“…[people]… they disgust me; and they’d better keep out of my way, or I’ll run them down.”
We’re only allowed a glimpse of his rhino horn, but we grasp the impact of his primitive instinct on the loose and its capacity to destroy. The contemporary resonance is obvious, and speaks not only to our present political moment but to the universal possibility for any civilization, culture, individual to devolve, to be corrupted by extreme ideologies which seek to fill the void, trampling what makes us human in the process.
Alex Ross, Tatiana Maslany, and John Turturro in “Rhinoceros” Credit: Hawver and Hall
Notably neither Berenger nor Jean was ever at ease in his own skin. For Jean, culture, logic, patience, and well-polished shoes fail to provide lasting comfort. Berenger drinks because he feel[s] “out of place in life.” And when the woman he loves, Daisy (in a gentle breeze of a performance by Tatiana Maslany), falls for another man, Dudard (Alex Ross) and succumbs to the prevailing winds by imagining these brutes are gods, Berenger might have lost all hope, but not quite.
In the play’s final moments which now bookend his opening monologue, Turturro’s Berenger, alone, and center stage, takes an heroic stand, a stab in the dark of this absurd world:
“I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them! I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”
