Sometimes the fortunate combination of the right director, the right cast, the right design team, and a historical moment combine to re-inject startling life into a work formerly dismissed as old-hat. Such is the case with Rhinoceros at American Repertory Theater. Superbly directed by Diane Paulus, with a stellar octet of players headed by John Turturro and Paul Giamatti, Eugène Ionesco’s metaphor explaining Hitler’s rise and Stalin’s triumph – seemingly rational people willfully transmogrifying into mindless beasts – hits home with new force, at a time when we’re beset by opportunistic greedheads and lickspittle toadies daily encroaching upon what it means to be truly human.
Act one kicks off as a conventional French boulevard comedy, complete with a quaint village setting that wouldn’t be inappropriate for The Baker’s Wife. Against Riccardo Hernández’s set pieces representing café, shop and church, elegant as an Advent calendar, a crisp-as-a-new bill Jean (Giamatti) hectors boozy, unkempt Berenger (Turturro) on his slovenly lifestyle. This tirade, executed with sparkling comic timing, is suddenly interrupted by – what else? – a rhino barreling through the square, an audience-based phenomenon rendered hilariously real by Fitz Patton (sound design) and Markus Maurette (special effects design). Left in the wake of the noise and dust are incredulous townsfolk unable to process what they’ve seen, not to mention one of the most awesome props in the history of the American theater, handed to mourning mama Harriett D. Foy (kudos to props coordinator Drew Bellah, no kidding).
As more and more rhinoceri swarm and turn out to be townsfolk metamorphosed, the action shifts to a legal office, where snobbish Dudard (Alex Ross) and Botard (Clay Singer, both excellent) debate the strange phenomenon as if it were happening miles away. They exemplify a chief Ionesco target, the intellectual who airily rationalizes evil; but Paulus wisely emphasizes the nakedly personal over the talkily political (the script has been deftly tightened). Each transformation seems to bring out a secret id: Office manager Papillon (Peter Francis James) releases his inner lech, Dudard turns Nietzschean Superman, and a bureaucrat’s wife (Kristine Nielsen) ecstatically rides her rhinossified husband like a bronco in sound and silhouette. The act culminates in Jean’s apartment, where a concerned Berenger witnesses sniffles turning into roars, a foot fallen asleep turning into giant stomps, and man becoming monster at the ripping-off of a pajama top. On Broadway in 1961 this sequence famously helped Zero Mostel reestablish himself after his 50’s blacklisting, but his turn cannot have topped Giamatti’s jaw-dropping tour de force here.
For act two, Hernández’s candy-box village turns into something along the lines of Anne Frank’s Secret Annex, and Turturro’s woebegone Berenger takes center stage as the unlikely last-Everyman-standing. The actor’s fire is long in simmering, especially as he struggles to persuade the comely Daisy (Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black, marvelous) to join the resistance. But with the appearance of the final cracks in the sociopolitical plaster, heroism and eloquence break out like the horns breaking out of everyone else’s foreheads. A magnificent performance.
The dangers of mindless conformity, of “going along with the times” as Ionesco has everyone put it, are still very much with us. Big Pachyderm is coming to pulverize us, sisters and brothers. There’s not much time left. This production of Rhinoceros is galvanizing.
Rhinoceros opened August 21, 2026, at the Loeb Drama Center (Cambridge, MA) and runs through September 27. Tickets and information: americanrepertorytheater.org
