- April 19, 2024
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Anyone with a remotely active Facebook account has experienced it.
Something somewhat controversial happens, the news gets out and reactive social media users swarm the web to share their thoughts. You might see a variety of opinions on your news feed, but the most extreme take in either direction gets the most reactions and comments — and the conversation that ensues might make you lose faith in humanity.
“You just start laughing because it’s ridiculous,” actor Laura Rook says of the situation. “You think, ‘This is not real,’ but it is real. And people’s feelings are involved, and they’re getting hurt. Or they’re laughing about it. Or they’re getting laughed at … because you thought these were the rules, but now the rules have changed, according to the mob.”
Rook, who plays Daisy in Asolo Repertory Theatre’s latest play, “Rhinoceros,” says the show is an absurdist piece of theater about conforming or not conforming to mob mentality, a mentality we see online every day. But in this play, the mob is a growing group of humans turning into rhinos.
The story follows a highly apathetic drunkard named Berenger who lives a simple life: He goes to work at his average office job, flirts with typist Daisy and goes home to drink. But when a rhinoceros runs through the square of his small French village one day, everything changes.
Slowly everyone around him is turning into a rhinoceros, and Berenger has to decide if he’s going to join them.
“It is literally about the creeping takeover of fascism,” says actor Matt Mueller, who plays coworker Dudard. “But I think more broadly it’s about how anything can take over if you’re complacent.”
The rhinoceros is clearly a metaphor in the play, he says, for how anything dangerous with a great deal of strength will gain power quickly if nobody takes a stand — whether it’s a strongly opinionated Facebook poster or a threatening dictator.
“Rhinoceros” was written by Eugène Ionesco in 1959, but the play is set in the 1930s, which Rook and Mueller agree helps them show the relevance of the story without getting too wrapped up in its modern implications.
Instead of throwing it in the viewers’ faces like they might if it were set in modern times, Mueller says the actors tell the story using underlying historical themes of movements like Nazism that inspired Ionesco to write this piece while living in post-WWII Europe.
Two-time Tony Award-winner Frank Galati directs the Asolo production, and he paid great attention to Ionesco’s time period and inspiration when preparing the show. Ionesco was greatly influenced by philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre, he says, as well as all the other intellectuals he came into contact with both in his home country of Romania and during his time in Paris in the “shadow of the growing fascist movement.”
“It was the dark specter of Hitler and the spread of fascism in Europe that so alarmed intellectuals and citizens with a kind of moral compass about what was happening,” he says. “In the late ’50s when Ionesco wrote the play he was churning up material that was seminal in the development of his artistic mission and his philosophical position in the world.”
Galati encouraged his actors to do their homework and get to know the playwright’s background because he believes understanding the “roots” of the play deepens the storytelling experience for both the actors and the audience when the storytellers are fueled by reflection.
Rook says she enjoyed “nerding out” and researching the history of both the play and Ionesco himself because she loves learning the context of the art she is exposed to, but she was also struck by how this period of brutal intolerance and xenophobia wasn’t that long ago — and in some respects, is still taking place today.
Rook, Mueller and Galati all agree that the historical roots of the play might help it resonate — absurdities and all — with their Sarasota audience because many Sarasotans were alive either during WWII or not long after.
“Some of our audience members who are in my generation or older have a collective memory of the Holocaust and WWII and the unthinkable atrocities committed in the name of fascism and dictatorship,” Galati says. “So our audience shares, I think, with Ionesco a long view of history … and if we’re students of history, maybe we won’t repeat the same horrible mistakes.”
What will help the play resonate with millennials and other younger generations, he says, are not only the modern implications that Rook and Mueller discussed, but the satirical format in which the play is presented.
“Rhinoceros” is a social satire, Galati says, and he compares it to “Saturday Night Live” and other comedic TV shows and movies that take current events and social issues and display them comically to not only provide comic relief and escape, but to point out the absurd nature of the happenings themselves.
“It’s the kind of social consciousness and tickling of the funny bone of the country that really great satire is capable of doing — it wakes us up,” Galati says. “It’s like a bath of cold water, it alerts us and warns us and gives us insight and access to very, very complicated social issues.”
By addressing these problems in both a playful and thoughtful way, Galati hopes his take on “Rhinoceros” will get more people interested in the play.
“Comedy is medicine,” he says. “It heals. It cauterizes wounds. It disarms us by making us laugh, and when you laugh, you are vulnerable. The great comic artist makes her point when the audience is disarmed in laughter.”
Rook says it’s the bizarre nature of the play that makes it funny on a basic level, but it’s also the unique take that Galati and his creative team created that will keep audiences laughing — and thinking.
“That’s the whole point of us doing this, to start a conversation post-show so people leave saying, ‘What did I just watch?’” Mueller says.
His favorite line of the play, which is Rook’s, sums this up well: “You’ll spoil everything if you go on having a bad conscience.”
