2024–2025
Rhinoceros
Playwright: Eugène Ionesco
November 7, 2024 – November 24, 2024
The Mainstage
About this play
In a provincial French town, one by one the inhabitants begin turning into rhinoceroses — snorting, charging, and eventually embracing their transformation with enthusiasm. Bérenger, an unremarkable everyman, watches as his friends, colleagues, and finally his lover succumb. He alone remains human, uncertain whether his stubbornness is heroism or mere stubbornness. Written in the shadow of fascism, the play is Ionesco's most direct examination of conformity and the seduction of totalitarianism.
A political allegory in which the citizens of a small town progressively transform into rhinoceroses.
About the Playwright
Eugène Ionesco (born Eugen Ionescu; November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright and one of the foremost figures of the Theatre of the Absurd. Born in Romania and settled in Paris, he wrote mostly in French and is best known for subverting the conventions of realist theatre to expose the absurdity of bourgeois life and the breakdown of human communication. His debut, The Bald Soprano (1950), ran in Paris for decades. He was elected to the Académie française in 1970.