Across the Ist-a-Verse
It's interesting: in the late 1950s, it seems that the whole world was afraid of the dangers of groupthink. Here in the United States, terrified anti-communists were producing Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And in France, a country still in many ways reeling from German occupation during the war, absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco created Rhinoceros, a play about the people of a village transforming into the aforementioned animals, as a statement against fascism.
Up until last week, my sole experience with Rhinoceros was last season's production of Orson's Shadow at PTC. It seemed, from the excerpts we were given, to be a strange play for Ionesco. It seemed just as absurd as his other works (most notably The Bald Soprano), but with far more serious implications. I was curious, and that curiosity gave way to excitement when I discovered that Mum Puppettheatre was producing Rhinoceros. At last, I'd get to see if the play was as weird and wonderful as I'd thought it must be – and produced by a company that I've consistently thought very highly of.
The one thing that I knew about productions of Rhinoceros going in was that the play was typically performed with masks – the easiest way to show the transition from man to rhino. So it's interesting that Mum, whose puppet work often extends to mask making, produced Rhinoceros without the use of a single onstage mask (two, it seems, were used backstage – more on that later). Director Robert Smythe's actors transform, sure, but that's what we call acting, kids. Acting and excellent lighting design by Shon Causer. Sometimes quickly, sometimes subtly, the actors adjusted their physicality to reflect the changes their characters were going through – but the final transformations always happened offstage, the actor disappearing and being replaced by the eerie shadow of a rhinoceros.
In fact, shadows played an important role in Mum's production: shadow puppets represented not only the rhinoceroses (I always thought it was "rhinoceri," but apparently not), but also other residents of the village, including the townspeople who observe the first rhino at the beginning of the show. A bit later, in what is one of the strongest moments in the play, two of these townspeople change from cardboard cutout silhouettes to the profiles of real people, albeit people with features exaggerated by what are most likely masks. The two silhouetted figures carry on a conversation about logic (mostly, the idea of the syllogism) while the play's central character, Berenger (John Lumia) and his friend Jean (Dave Johnson) discuss their reactions to the rhinos.
Lumia and Johnson actually lend two of the best performances to the play: the former as the anti-protagonist, so unable to think for himself that Smythe directed him to read many of his lines from the script rather than reciting them from memory (although they were likely memorized all the same), and the latter as his headstrong, cocky, and self-assured friend whose transformation into a rhinoceros is both well acted and incredibly jarring to behold.
But despite these admirable performances by people-actors, the most impressive were done by puppet-actors. Not just the aforementioned shadows, either: puppets are employed at Berenger's office as stand-ins for the two senior-most staffers and for Mrs. Boeuf, the wife of a colleague who we discover has transformed into a rhino. This is all used to great humorous effect, and also shows the versatility of the six-person cast. The most impressive puppet of all, however, is the last one you see: the fully-realized, fully-articulated rhinoceros, where before you'd only seen shadows of the beast. It is beautiful and powerfully done. The only problem is that, upon seeing it, you kind of want to be a rhino, too.
Image via Mum Puppettheatre. Rhinoceros runs through Saturday, October 27.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)