Fringe, Reviewed: Eugène Ionesco’s "Rhinoceros"
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins?"
[ theater ]
Eugène Ionesco's "Rhinoceros", by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium
Attended: Wed. Sept. 3, 7:30 p.m., closes Sept. 21
A contagious hysteria is sweeping the city. One by one, residents grow horns, trample flowerbeds, decimate buildings — a citizenry gone gaga for conformity. Two friends struggle to maintain their identity and sanity. Who will turn next?
WE THINK:
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has grown up through the Fringe, producing every September since 2006. Artistic director Tina Brock has developed a reliable company of actors who understand her eclectic selections from the absurdist catalog, designers who do a lot with few resources and a distinctive IRC style. Rhinoceros exemplifies this, showing a metropolis suddenly besieged and its citizens working hard to understand, rationalize, and finally survive the phenomenon. At its center is Berenger (Ethan Lipkin), a hapless Everyman who wants to keep his job, avoid trouble and get the girl (Kirsten Quinn); the actors are both IRC veterans in a fine ensemble who really get it.
The play builds from amusingly chatty to relentlessly strident, aided at Wednesday's second of three preview performances (it opens Friday, Sept. 5) by the cast starting at IRC's loudest and fastest pitch instead of building to it. Our journey is very much like Berenger's: before we understand what's happening, it's consuming us. "Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins?" Berenger's colleague Mr. Dudard (Paul McElwee) asks, a question Ionesco wants us to ponder. Are the rhinos real (and if so, are they African or Asiatic?) or merely the result of "collective psychosis"?
Erica Hoelscher's many rhino masks are delightfully spooky, her set basic yet clever and her costumes colorful and witty, all lit with verve by Maria Shaplin. Sometimes Rhinoceros feels like trying to follow a very fast sport without knowing the rules, but that seems intentional; it certainly results in a fun existential adventure.
