By Bill Marx

Director Diane Paulus’s high-spirited A.R.T. adaptation of Ionesco’s anti-conformist play sometimes overplays its comic business, but John Turturro’s scruffy, strident, and anguished Berenger gives the production its necessary mix of horror, humor, and desperate resistance.

Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. Translated by Derek Prouse. Adapted by the American Repertory Theater. Directed by Diane Paulus. Staged by the A.R.T. at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through September 27.

Paul Giamatti (Jean) and John Turturro (Berenger) in the American Repertory Theater production of Rhinoceros. Photo: Hawver and Hall.

In New England, 2026 is the year of the Rhinoceros, at least among our major regional theaters. In March, the Yale Repertory Theatre mounted a production of Eugène Ionesco’s exposé of authoritarian creep (my review), and now the American Repertory Theater is following up with its own compelling adaptation of the 1959 script. These stagings are part of a welcome boomlet for the dramatist — a revival of Arlekin Players’ recent splendid production of Ionesco’s Delirium will be open on September 8 in Brooklyn.

The repeated sightings of the beast make grim sense. In Rhinoceros, Ionesco targets collectivist movements of Left and Right while drawing on his memories of Nazism’s rise in Romania. The play, he said in an interview, seeks “to denounce, to expose, to demonstrate how an ideology is transformed into idolatry, how it pervades everything, how it brings the masses to hysteria . . .” Today, pachyderms of uncontrolled cruelty are again on the rampage: fascist muscle is pushing the current administration, tyrannical swarms are increasing around the world. But Ionesco’s target was larger than autocratic geopolitics; he condemned “the malady of conformity which knows no bounds, no boundaries.”

As I have argued elsewhere, the postwar absurdists—Ionesco, Beckett, Albee, and their peers—offer unusually acute diagnoses of our shell-shocked response to polycrisis. Their worlds of irrationality, panic, dehumanization, bureaucratic cruelty, and social contagion anticipate a reality increasingly shaped by online homogenization and AI-assisted conformity. In Cory Doctorow’s term, today’s rhinocerization is the enshittification of public and private life: the steady degradation of systems, language, institutions, and imagination until submission to the herd feels inevitable—even normal. The dictatorship of the algorithms inevitably entrenches uniformity as it goes about undercutting individual creativity.

As for how Rhinoceros should be staged, Ionesco wrote in his essay “Experience of the Theater” that “the unendurable admits of no solution, and only the unendurable is profoundly tragic, profoundly comic, and essentially theatrical.” That volatile fusion of humor and terror supplies the key to staging this play and many of the dramatist’s others. The play’s last remaining human, Berenger, reasonably concludes that there is no way to know whether the transformations of his fellow villagers—his friend Jean and his beloved Daisy among them—into rhinoceroses are reversible. The dramatic action systematically renders his existence “unendurable.” People seem content to devolve into beasts, a metamorphosis propelled by admiration for unquestioned strength, rationalized obedience to power, and the spell cast by grotesque beauty. Humankind’s preference for the primal offers ample opportunities for humor, from villagers who deny what is unfolding before their eyes to their slow, steady refusal to remain human. Ionesco exploits them skillfully without indulging in the zany at the expense of the serious.

Tatiana Masiany and John Turturro in the American Repertory Theater production of Rhinoceros. Photo: Hawver and Hall.

In what will be her final production at the Loeb Drama Center, director Diane Paulus makes the most of Ionesco’s farce, propelling the action with snappy, high-spirited invention. The company’s adaptation is zesty, fleshing out some of the playwright’s sketchily drawn characters with droll bits of physical business and sprinkling in topical updates, including a few obscenities. At times, though, Paulus piles on the hijinks: a dead cat can be beaten for a laugh only so many times. Nor does the set’s pint-sized church—eventually tipped on its side—do much to visualize the play’s increasingly airless, rhino-enforced claustrophobia.

The performances, by contrast, are consistently strong. Paul Giamatti establishes an appealingly friendly, if patronizingly bossy, rapport with John Turturro’s Berenger before his character’s chronic insecurity—concealed beneath a façade of by hidebound certainty—morphs spectacularly into the animalistic. Giamatti’s transformation into a rhinoceros is hilariously fussy, a memorable sequence of comic starts and stutters. Yet its modulated agility ends up softening the ugliness and violence signified by the transformation. People willingly turn into monsters in this play: they reject their humanity in exchange for the satisfyingly brute power of indifference. As Daisy, Tatiana Maslany nimbly pokes at the role’s nurturing stereotype, suggesting that it can be a surprisingly thin veneer over the bestial. Her apparent empathy—her care for Berenger, for example—masks a more conventional attraction to unassailable strength: the seductive promise of belonging in groupthink’s siren song. If the males in the play are barbarized by their need for certainty, its women are undercut by their need for attachment — Mrs. Bœuf becomes a beast out of love for her husband.

For Ionesco, individuality is not a matter of stubborn, conscious choice. It is an intuitive acceptance of anguish as the way of the world—a chronic pain made even more absurdly “unendurable” once society turns authoritarian. Berenger is condemned to be human, and John Turturro offers a marvelous, multi-layered version of the anguished antihero. The emotional range of his scruffy, strident, hapless, alcoholic nonconformist expands and contracts with impressive ease, moving from comic and pathetic to needy and resolute. It is a terrific performance, testament to the playwright’s belief that, in the theater, the revelation of an unbearable truth can be luminous and comforting.

Editor’s Note: Sixty years ago, in Conversations with Eugène Ionesco (translated by Jan Dawson), the dramatist made this idyllic wish about the future of Rhinoceros: “It is very possible that Rhinoceros will become incomprehensible — I hope it will — in a world where all men have become lucid, with free personalities and autonomy of thought, and yet not separated from each other. When that world exists, people will no longer understand what I am trying to say. Or else they’ll try to decipher my play like some document from a vanished era.  I hope this will happen.” The tragedy is not merely that we understand the play; it is that we keep finding new ways to crank out rhinoceroses.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.