Word: ionesco
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RHINOCEROS is the play that established Ionesco's international reputation, and it is still one of his best. It is the quintessential Ionesco play: a nightmare of wholly clogged, overrun world. Words, persons, things, and animals proliferate in a slambang of entrances and exits that snowball in a confusion of ceaseless movement. Theatricality and insanity, the two most potent themes of modern theater, are the subject as well as the method. A production of an Ionesco play involves almost as many problems as there are stage directions. The coordination of movement and dialogue must be perfect; the hectic action must...
Berenger, the alcoholic and unkempt anti-hero of many Ionesco plays, is the main character. He is apathetic and lacks the will to live. On a Sunday morning he and his conventional friend Jean are involved in an accident in which one, or perhaps two, rhinos are observed, or believed to be observed, charging down the main street of the sleepy town. Gradually more and more rhinos appear. They are town citizens afflicted with rhinoceritis, a disease which not only makes them change into rhinos but actually makes them want to turn themselves into these strong, aggressive, and insensitive pachyderms...
...said that Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros to express his feelings about his native Rumania during the 1930's when his countrymen increasingly fell under the spell of fascism. The play is certainly a tract against conformist and the inhumanity it produces, but it goes far deeper than simple propaganda. If the various townspeople who rationalize and stumble their way into the rhino herd are absurd, Ionesco says, so is Berenger, the one man who holds out. His defiant profession of faith in humanity is farcical rather than heroic, showing that individuality in an indifferent universe can be as futile as conformity...
...THEATRE Centre opens its season with Jack, or The Submission and The Bald Soprano by Ionesco, two plays with a spooky flux between motion and verbiage. Harnessing the two elements for full impact calls less for enthusiasm, which these productions have in quantity, than for measured coordination of stage blockings. In the HTC program notes, Director-Producer Rosann Weeks asserts an ideal commitment to "vital, direct, and positive communication with our audience." Somehow or other, their good intentions get tripped up in a confusion of artistic priorities, which leaves the first play choppy, the second slow-paced and staid...
...Theatre Centre troupe has, I repeat, no new method of acting or stage presentation and certainly no new gloss on Ionesco. What it does have is a remarkable optimism which can be felt if not communicated. "Man can and should be a determiner of life rather than a victim," the program notes blazon. Thus, in the Old West Church in Boston, in the midst of some harrowing Urban Renewal skyscrapers, a theatrical group has thrown off the pessimist syndrome which Daniel Moynihan recently tabbed "mediocre." Unfortunately, at this stage in its development, the HTC lacks the artistic expertise to complement...