"Crazy but True, Ionesco at The Shakespeare Festival"
By Alvin Klein

It’s crazy, it’s absurd, it doesn’t make sense. But it’s true, it’s profound, it’s realer that real.

Still astonishing after more than 40 years, Eugene Ionesco’s "Rhinoceros" signifies yet another bold artistic leap for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival here.

Most of the audience Tuesday evening participated, articulately and appreciatively, in a post-performance discussion. Many said they perceived the play as Ionesco retaliation against Fasicism. Others sensibly interpreted its outlandish fantastical events in terms of outlandish currents events, political especially when it came to matter of mortality.

And "Rhinoceros" is a resounding statement about the insensitivity of bureaucracies that stiffly creativity and wipe out happiness. It follows that many people in the audience related to the play as a warning about technological overkill.

While figuring out what Ionesco was up to its provocative - limitless in academes possibilities, and personal and social implications - describing what "Rhinoceros" is about is much easier.

It is about a "Rhinoceros who once was a man, racing about a small town. And then there are two, causing terror. One by one each citizen morphs into a rhino, one of them, totally, before our every eyes.

Finally, only two people who are people remain. And then there is one. His name is Berenger and he says "I’m the last man left and I’m staying that way until the end."

That is how the play closes, but not until he adds: "I’m not capitulating!"

For anyone who didn’t get the message by then, that last line makes it clear that "Rhinoceros" is a battle cry, perhaps more aptly a cattle cry, against the heard mentality and the extremes of conformity. It is also a cautionary tale about the price of individuality. For the last holdout is inevitably a loner, which may be the play’s one literal, inarguable detail.

But is that really all Ionesco was up to?

It’s only the plot, not that he really cared about plot. Although Ionesco wrote stories, most wonderfully for and about children, storytelling for the stage was not his concern. Nor were other standards of theater - character, dialogue, making sense. Yes his language is extraordinary and poetic, but more a playful, inverted, musical and choreographic act of creation than a furtherance of action.

Trying to explain an Ionesco play, therefore, seems beside the point. What then is the point? It’s experience and, most emphatically, laughter. He wanted people to feel what the artist feels, and it is no secret that Ionesco not only perceived himself as Berenger, but also that he wrote at least three plays, one before and one after "Rhinoceros" with Berenger as the hero, or perhaps anti-hero.

In the first work, he is truely heroic, discovering a town of perpetual sunshine. But it is deserted because there is a killer on the loose. When Berenger finds the killer, he tries to kill him, but cannot. He is killed instead. In the third berenger is king of a fantasy country. He dies.

In Paul Mullins incisive staging of "Rhinoceros" here, Paul Niebanck’s Berenger is less a hero than an ambivalent contemporary man of Chaplinesque sadness, and in that double-edged performance, Ionesco’s belief in the oneness of tragedy and comedy is hauntingly brought to life.

Mr. Niebanck’s nuanced performance, at once despairing, desperately holding on, summoning strength, is a visualization of the no-win human condition. Does anyone really want to be the last person on earth? Is it better to join the mob, mindless as it is?

To become conscious of what is horrifying, and to laugh at it, is to become master of that which is horrifying, Ionesco said. The comic alone is capable of giving us the strength to bear the tragedy of existence. He went on to say that ruth can only be revealed by fantasy, which is more realistic than reality.

In a lovely ensemble, enhance by Michael Giannitti’s precise lighting and Richard Dionne’s spooky and dissonant sound effects, Roy Cockrum as the paradoxical named logician, with his talk of collective psychosis like religion, plays Ionesco’s dance of words with a comic awareness of the pedantic. Katie MacNichol as the last woman - that is before she runs off to join the galloping others - is touching in her insistence that we must be sensible. And though Andrew Weems is too emphatic, perilously bordering on camp in the first scene, his most visible transformation and submission to rhinoceritis is a bravura turn.

Mr. Mullin’s work as a director cuts to Ionesco’s essence, and this may be the time to let him know of a friend’s comment after the performance:

"I would like to thank him for my summer," she said, referring as well to Mr. Mullins’s delicious work as an actor in the June production of "The Forest," which was directed by Bonnie J. Monte, the festival’s artistic director. And to Ms. Monte, thanks for the adventure. Its seems safe to say the whole audience thanks you.

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