Word: rhinos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...willfully-obscure, Playwright lonesco in Rhinoceros is by curtain time all too obvious. To the most insistent of modern-day themes, conformity, he brings the most extravagant of illustrations: that, mass-pressured enough, people will even be rhinoceroses. What starts in a provincial French town as hysteria over a rhino running loose, ends as everybody's hysteria to become one. Logicians are as eager as businessmen, leftists as logicians; at the end just one fuddled clerk (attractively played by Eli Wallach) remains human. And even he vows not to capitulate only after ruefully condemning his appearance-"A smooth brow...
...individuality and is driven to joining the bestial herd. Many characters protest the change, but relentlessly their skins thicken and wrinkle, their voices become grunts, and great ski-jump tusks appear on their faces. "We must resist rhinocerization at any cost," cry the seemingly unafflicted, but already they start, rhino-like, to munch odd bits of paper, ivy leaves, potted plants...