Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 classic Rhinoceros pushes realism overboard to leave humor as humanity’s last hope in an absurdist world. The play begins as a crowd of bustling townspeople turn from their café conversations and shopping to observe a rhinoceros galloping past the town square. “Well, of all things!” they each say in turn, a chorus of individuals sharing the same vacuous thought. The Vermont Stage production unleashes the wild comedy ticking beneath this sly commentary on conformity.
The preposterous invades a provincial town. At first, people reject what they don’t want to believe and the journalists who report it. What the townspeople do next offers a satirical lesson in accommodating a crushing outside force. Human after human transforms into a rhinoceros, and the mystery isn’t why but how easily people adapt. An offstage rhinoceros wrecks an office staircase, but the workers, still on deadline, file out the window on a fireman’s ladder. Even a mass metamorphosis doesn’t rattle people who prize normalcy.
Tricky but satisfying staging is crucial. Director Cristina Alicea uses theatrical space, sound and light to help us imagine what can’t be staged and performance to convey how characters make sense of the senseless.
She unlocks the play’s humor by rendering Ionesco’s repetitive, looping language as vocal choreography, played against physical choreography designed by Carissa Bellando. The more people onstage, the better — a wide vista of tedious arguments and frilly philosophy demonstrates how easily people are satisfied with a superficial view of the world. A rhinoceros sticks out as odd, of course, but it’s nothing a logician can’t bury inside a temple of extraneous propositions or an intellectual can’t rationalize. It’s language that engulfs the stage, not pachyderms.
Bérenger is the central character, though he lacks any obvious heroic virtues. An unshaven, unambitious man in a rumpled shirt and drooping jacket, he drinks too much and must listen to his good friend Jean’s instruction on overcoming his manifold flaws. Jean presents himself as a paradigm of refinement. Bérenger is weak precisely where Jean pokes him, but it’s up to us to notice that Jean is nothing more than a fussy functionary who has accepted society’s easy recipe for purpose in life.
Ionesco’s three-act satire operates on many levels. In the aftermath of World War II and the start of the Cold War, some saw the play as a shock to the complacent, including the French who accepted the German occupation. These rhinoceroses aren’t gray but green, the color of the Wehrmacht.
Fascism was no theoretical menace to Ionesco, who immigrated to France from Romania, where he saw the rise of the Iron Guard. Contemporary audiences will miss such allusions, as well as Ionesco’s intricate deflation of intellectual arguments justifying Stalin or blindly advancing unions. This production wisely cuts some repetition Ionesco used to embody grandiose, hollow intelligence.
The term “theater of the absurd” refers to work by playwrights such as Ionesco and Samuel Beckett who tackled existential themes by squeezing characters into hopeless or fantastical settings and giving them nearly nothing with which to chip their way out. If life is meaningless, these plays contend, let’s put the audience face-to-face with what meaningless means: hyperbole, silliness and societal collapse.
Staging the play now pours it into the new context of society’s current accommodation of authoritarianism. But Ionesco’s satire of rationalization is a product of its time. Today, we’re left with his central trick, a method for tipping the audience off balance. The political overtone slips into the background as Alicea emphasizes the bright comedy of the bourgeois succumbing to near-vaudevillian oddity sprouting up in everyday life.
All hints of realism, in costume, speech and manner, coexist with the inexplicable. Scenic designer Chuck Padula fills the upstage wall with windows and doors, branching off a platform with two sets of stairs that send actors to floor level. As the play progresses, scene settings keep narrowing, from a town square to an office to a flat to a character all alone.
In Rhinoceros, science, math, logic and philosophy all melt away. What survives is the ridiculous.
A thrust stage obliges Alicea to keep actors moving, while stylization impels big reactions. Yet this is no clown act; the characters are essentially convincing as people. Their extreme predicament never erodes their most human quality: reliance on clichés and pomposity. Characters are often propelled by single-minded energy, like jack-in-the-box puppets subject to outside forces. The net effect is a destabilized world spinning so wildly that we have to laugh.
Alicea uses zones of single colors to convey the uniformity of an office and radical lighting to assert the limits of reality. Sarah Sophia Lidz’s excellent costume design finds the quintessence of each town stereotype. The thundering sound of the rhinoceroses is powerfully enhanced by vibration.
Most actors play multiple characters, all of them perfect cartoons. Brayden Crickenberger, Jon Francois, Safiya Jamali, Aleah Papes and Laura Roald add distinctive polish to their caricatures.
Fred Patchen plays Jean on his self-important journey from bureaucrat to rhinoceros, including a powerful finale. Abby Maurice, with a keen instinct for comic pauses, plays the secretary who enchants both Bérenger and his office rival. Mark Roberts and Ian Walls are two self-styled intellectuals whose murky ideological differences subsist on passion alone.
Jordan Gullikson plays Bérenger in full untidy glory. Bérenger is our Everyman, and as such his character is a mess of blurred needs, unlike the crisply stylized folks around him. With everything else in the play drawn in primary colors, Bérenger’s mottle sometimes doesn’t register clearly. Gullikson puts so much anti in this antihero that Bérenger seems more hapless bystander than the audience’s lens, but he does focus us in the end.
In Rhinoceros, science, math, logic and philosophy all melt away. What survives is the ridiculous, poking its head in anywhere one bothers to look. The play’s raw materials allow each director to take it in different directions, and Alicea has chosen to send us home smiling, unperturbed by what we might have in common with these characters. Faced with a meaningless existence, laughter is perhaps not just the best response but the only one. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Herd Mentality”
This article appears in May 6 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
