“Rhinoceros”

Eugène Ionesco

Translated by Derek Prouse

As a middle-aged, single man who works in a French village’s newspaper office, Berenger “just can’t get used to life,” has “barely got the strength to go on living,” and tells his friend Gene as he readies himself for a mid-day cognac, “I feel out of place in life, so I drink.”  On this Sunday morning, the fastidiously dressed Gene berates with no mercy the disheveled, hung-over Berenger, pouring a flood of insults about everything from his frazzled hair to his slumping shoulders, concluding that Berenger is “a positive disgrace.”  As a background rumbling grows threateningly louder, the now-angry Berenger admits that life is so bad for him that “solitude oppresses me as does the company of other people.”  As the back-and-forth argument reaches climatic peaks, onto the scene bursts an intruder that will soon change everything for the wide-eyed, open-mouthed Berenger and Gene as well as for everyone else they know in the village.  A loud-trumpeting, dust-raising rhinoceros speeds down the street in front of them, leaving havoc and destruction wherever it goes.

In 1959, Romanian-French Avant-garde playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote a play in response to his experience of the French populace’s reaction to the invading Nazis when he observed most people could not believe what was happening but generally looked the other way and conformed to their new state of fascist life.  His Rhinoceros has since been translated in a number of adaptations and now arrives on the American Conservatory Theater stage in a 1960 English translation by Derek Prouse.  Inoesco’s surreal, darkly funny Rhinoceros became one of a number of early examples of the Theatre of the Absurd in which day-to-day human existence suddenly loses its purpose, leading to a preponderance of irrational, illogical actions and events.  ACT”s current production strikes home in 2019 as it reminds us how quickly a society – any society – can accept with little-to-no protest brute force, violence, and destruction of their norms and institutions as normal and even eventually as even attractive.

David Breitbarth is a Berenger who has a generic, everyman manner about him – someone who could easily be overlooked as he walks down the street or sits at a table sipping another drink.  He is certainly not the person anyone would ever expect to be heroic or even daring, especially given his disillusionment with his life.  But as the number of rhinos begins to grow in his village and especially as his friends one-by-one begin to decide “you get used to” the growing herd of ramrodding beasts that “we can’t do anything about it,” David Breitbarth’s Berenger goes through a number of transformations himself while resisting the ultimate metamorphosis that others around him more and more readily undergo.  Curiosity gives way to stunned but sympathetic observation to total panic and finally to lone, resolved resistance and defiance.  A man who is a nobody even to his best friend Gene becomes before us the one somebody who has enough wherewithal not to follow the cliff-jumping lemmings all around him.  And through David Breitbarth’s skillful portrayal, Berenger continues through it all to be that Everyman we first meet.

The friends, townspeople, and co-workers around him are themselves an eclectic group of personalities – all in the end illustrating how widespread and quickly a spreading societal shift can occur among a general population.  When Berenger arrives at work on Monday morning, he and others hear a blowhard, self-righteous Mr. Botard (Jomar Tagatac) dismiss even first-hand accounts of the previous day’s encounters with rhinoceroses.  The ACT adaptation takes on a feel of today as Botard calls it all “fake news” and suggests what others thought were rhinos were in fact just “undocumented immigrants.”

Teddy Spencer is Mr. Dudard, another co-worker who is not yet so quick to dismiss the secretary Daisy’s (Rona Figueroa) repeated fact that she saw one of the invaders, with of course Botard totally ignoring this lower-ranked employee’s account as unbelievable and outrageous.  The lisping editor of the paper who cuts the air with his piercing voice, Mr. Papillion (Danny Sheie), is a non-believer himself and is more worried about everyone getting to the day’s work than all this talk about beasts in the streets. 

A late-arriving, completely shaken, and out-of-breath Mrs. Boeuf (Trish Mulholland) brings fresh evidence of what is going on outside their very office; and even though a low rumble is growing into the sound of an approaching freight train, the chauvinist Mr. Botard continues to ridicule both women.  But as a crash and a rising dust-storm lead to office chaos, almost all of these town folk – believers and doubters and those in-between – are all on their way to dramatic plunges and quick chases down the streets in order not to be left out of the new in-crowd.  Trish Mulholland’s Mrs. Boeuf herself takes a leap into the oncoming storm that is worth the price of the ticket to behold!

Among those destined for a date joining the growing crowd of the newly ‘rhinoed’ is Berenger’s pompous and emphatically correct-in-every-respect friend, Gene.  Matt Decaro plays Gene with full bombastic air, providing many of the evening’s best moments for great acting and full-on hilarity.  A scene where the rotund Gene transforms bit-by-increasingly-more-bit into ‘one of them’ is rip-roaringly fun to watch.  With a voice becoming more hoarse and growly, hands curling into paws, and a belly taking on new, bloated dimensions right before our eyes, even we have to believe as does Berenger that the now-charging, head-down Gene has in fact become a bellowing rhinoceros.

The A.C.T. adaptation of Rhinoceroshas drastically trimmed the original, three-act play with its upwards of twenty-plus roles into a ninety-minute (that includes intermission!) version with just nine, key roles.  Some of the original play’s key features – like repeated clichés that townspeople use in describing their increasingly blasé reactions to the invading destruction around them – are missing in this stripped-down version, making this adaptation somewhat weaker, in my opinion, in showing how a general population can so easily fall prey to shifting cultural and political environments – even those clearly evil. 

Having said that, Frank Galati’s direction of this adaptation provides much satirical humor, laugh-out-loud surprises, and wonderful effects to keep our interest peeled to the unlikely but clearly very real events unfolding before us.  The sound effects alone designed by Joseph Cerqua provide ominous warnings and seat-shaking realities of the changes coming to the village and its environs that Robert Perdziola has so wonderfully illustrated in both huge, brightly painted, curtained backdrops and in minimal but effective movable scenic elements.  His own rhinoceros contribution via scenic effect and his designs of costumes for both the everyday and quirky townsfolk (including a horned and transformed team of the village’s firefighters) are also worthy of their own loud applause.  Joseph Cerqua has also composed original music – some of which is beautifully sung by Lauren Spencer – music that adds to the French atmosphere.

As enjoyable as many aspects of the evening are, it feels to me that some of the impact of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros has been lost in the dust of ACT’s trying to make this version more succinct and to the point.  At the same time, there is enough remaining to throw up a mirror for us as audience to recognize that a society – maybe even our American society – can in fact change for the worst almost overnight through a lot of group acquiescence to bluster.

Rating: 3.5 E

Rhinoceroscontinues through June 23, 2019 at American Conservatory Theater, 405 Geary Street, San Francisco.  Tickets are available online at http://www.act-sf.org/ or by calling the box office 415-749-2228.

Photos by Kevin Berne