Dormouse Theatre recently opened its production of “Rhinoceros.” WMUK’s Gordon Bolar has this review.
Since the first term of the current American President, a few classics have been resurrected for the stage with decidedly political implications. These include Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday.
Operating in a former worship space on Portage Road, Dormouse Theatre’s production of Rhinoceros reminds its audience about the relevance of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play to the rise of fascism prior to World War II.
Rhinoceros also serves as a not-so-subtle warning that authoritarianism has once again reared its ugly horn to threaten America and the world today.
Rhinoceros is a brilliant metaphor for those who would forsake their humanity, individuality, and powers of reasoning to join the ranks of the animalistic, hard-charging, brute forces inhabiting the jungle. During much of the play’s three-hour length, however, Ionesco’s cautionary tale struggles to hold the stage and consistently maintain audience attention.
It is true that Ionesco and other Theatre of the Absurd writers rebelled against traditional dramatic structure. This accounts for some of the 65-year-old script’s difficulties in accelerating the overall action and grazing too long in the same place.
For example, the characters who populate a French Provincial town repeatedly make the point that some of the invading rhinoceroses taking over the town have two horns, while some have only one. These frequent, mildly humorous observations serve little purpose, other than to demonstrate the local citizenry’s focus on the trivial, instead of the real threat right in front of them. After a while, one is ready to say, “Point made, please move on.”
The problems for Dormouse Theatre’s Rhinoceros, start with a curious assortment of overlong pre-show recorded music leading into the show’s opening. These extended selections, some of which are laden with political messages of questionable relevance, pushed the advertised 7:00 p.m. curtain time to a start time of 7:33 p.m. for last Friday’s performance.
The real challenges for Rhinoceros manifest themselves immediately after the show begins. They include the plodding pace and unfocused staging of director Stephen Dupuie’s production.
As the play opens, Ionesco’s central character, Berenger, and friend Jean, chat in a sidewalk café about Berenger’s need to conform to society’s expectations. An overlapping and competing conversation takes place across the street about logic, between two of the town’s inhabitants.
Instead of a clear and crisp alternation between these two simultaneous conversations, the audience is left to sort out who is speaking, who needs to pick up their cue, the sense of what is being said, and its relevance to the sound of pounding hooves from the imminent invasion down the street.
Similarly, the gathering crowd of locals viewing the offstage onslaught with alarm, displays an uneven response to the mayhem threatened by the charging, trumpeting, yet-to-be seen herd of rhinoceroses.
Here many key lines and exchanges are trampled on and made unintelligible, not by the sounds of the stampede, but by screams and shouts of other characters on stage. Making matters worse, some actors speak their lines with other performers standing in front of them.
The question arises from this jumbled muddy scene: is the seeming chaos intended to underscore Ionesco’s representation of the illogical nature of the human condition, a tenet of Theatre of the Absurd, or is it merely poor execution by the performers? I would bet on the latter, but this unanswered question persists throughout the evening.
Thankfully, one key scene does deliver the impact needed to accentuate the distasteful results awaiting those who join the growing horned throng around them. Jean, played by Dan Fialkowski, delivers a visceral, earthy, and believable performance as one in the throes of a horrid transformation, while Berenger looks on helplessly.
In the final tedious, hour-long scene, Oliverliski Murphy Jr., as Berenger, struggles to resist the lumbering, seductive dance of rhinos that beckon him at his apartment window. After his love interest deserts him, presumably lured by the waiting, weighty beasts outside, Berenger engages in a drawn-out, self-deliberation about whether he should follow her lead. Although the play ends with Berenger refusing to capitulate to the herd mentality, we’re never really sure why, or what it is in his journey that brings him to this admirable decision. Is he meant to be considered a hero? Or are there any heroes in Ionesco’s jumbled and absurdist world?
Or maybe, just maybe, when the program cover for the play you are watching has a graphic of the animal in the play’s title wearing that familiar looking red hat from the political arena, all you really need to know is right in front of you.