Word: ionesco
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...Ionesco's Jack, or the Submission is just about as absurd as theatre gets. It alternates between caricatures and specious profundity, demanding and receiving unconvincing performances from the cast. Michael Nach is properly flaccid as Jack, a young man whose family reviles him until he declares he does like hash browned potatoes, and then tries to marry him off to Roberta, Janice Brown, a three-nosed beauty whom he finds insufficiently ugly. Miss Brown performs very well, as most of the cast seems to; "seems" because it is difficult to know exactly what the roles should be and exactly...
...Ionesco and the Charles Playhouse ought to make a perfect couple--Ionesco with innumerable gimmicks to lure his audience onto the stage, the Charles with its seats circling the platform and its actors circling the platform and its actors scurrying up and down the aisles. In Michael Murray's Rhinoceros, which opened at the Charles last week, the marriage almost comes off--but not quite--and the man who ruined the wedding isn't hard to find. Robert Barend's fumbling portrayal of Berenger spoils a delightful Ionesco tragicomedy, leaving a passable production with too many thuds where there should...
...Barend fails to communicate; his delivery is slurred and his funny lines dribble out like sap from a rubber tree. He plays a weak foil to a fine supporting cast, and is nearly forgotten in his scenes with Jean, Daisy, and M. Dudard (James Beard). Barend even spoils Ionesco's counterpoint in the first act, where lines, roles, and arguments flow from one character to another in a masterpiece of confusion...
Murray's production succeeds in almost every other respect. The scenery is quaintly French, the sound effects--bellowing beasts and thundering herds--frightfully realistic, and the two bedrooms scenes deftly staged. Ionesco's dry comic touches exude his French sense of humor and the final scene in Berenger's room could be quite powerful with a suitable player. If Barend learns to act, the Rhinoceros will be a welcome guest in Boston...
...scene of the hysteria in Wheeler's Soprano is the living room of the Smith's bourgeois home in the suburbs (Ionesco's Soprano originally exploded in a British parlor). On the left hand side of Don Berry's spare and perfectly appropriate set, Mr. Smith (Jerry Gershman) digests the evening newspaper, while on the right Mrs. Smith (Jo Lane) thinks over the dinner they may or may not have eaten--it never becomes clear which...