It took a few years, but French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s 65-year-old absurdist comedy “Rhinoceros” is getting noticed again amid the current global political climate. The play is widely read as a response to encroaching fascism, though it easily fits many other models of widespread oppression or social upheaval.
“Rhinoceros” is having a big, blaring moment right now. An off-off-Broadway production opens this week at the Gene Frankel Theatre, while another New York City production closes this week at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. There was a “Rhinoceros” last month in North Carolina, the University of Arkansas is doing the play this month and there’s another production coming up in April in Vermont. Many other productions have recently happened or are about to happen, from California to Virginia and beyond. The play’s ubiquity is beginning to rival Shakespeare and “A Christmas Carol” on theater stages.
In Connecticut, New London’s Flock Theatre staged “Rhinoceros” outdoors last summer at the Connecticut College Arboretum, and Western Connecticut State University’s West Rep Stage will do the play April 17-26.
The biggest “Rhinoceros” in the state, however, is directed by Liz Diamond, stars Broadway actor Reg Rogers and runs March 6-28 at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. For its production, Yale Rep is using Frank Galati’s adaptation of the standard Derek Prouse translation of Ionesco’s script, which Galati directed himself at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida in 2018 and at the American Conservatory Theater in California in 2019. Galati, who died in 2023, was well known for adapting literary works for the stage and screen, including the award-winning Steppenwolf Theatre rendition of “The Grapes of Wrath” and the movie “The Accidental Tourist.”
Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” had its world premiere in Paris in January 1960. The first English language production was four months later in London. The London production inspired a play itself: “Orson’s Shadow” by Austin Pendleton, a comedy about the tensions between the show’s star Laurence Olivier and its director Orson Welles.
The play concerns an average guy named Berenger (a character name that Ionesco used in other works, and who seems to share some background details with the playwright) who sees the people around him acting strangely and spouting odd sentiments.
“Liz Diamond wrote me an email saying she was going to do it,” Rogers said. “I had to move some things around, but the opportunity was hard to pass up.”
Will Dagger (left) as Dudard and Reg Rogers as Berenger rehearsing “Rhinoceros” at Yale Repertory Theatre. Ionesco’s classic anti-Fascist comedy runs March 6-28. (Joan Marcus)
Rogers has had a great few years in this phase of his long acting career. He was in the recent Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” playing Joe Josephson for the show’s entire run and also appearing in its filmed version. Then he got to play Mr. Mushnik in the long-running off-Broadway production of another musical, “Little Shop of Horrors,” a role which he said he’ll be returning to.
Connecticut audiences have known Rogers’ work since he was a student at the Yale School of Drama in the early 1990s. While he was a student, he appeared in a landmark production of “Stage Door” directed by his classmate Mark Rucker, as well as the new drama “Amnestia” by Kerry Kennedy and a small role in the 1960s S.J. Perelman comedy “The Beauty Part.”
A year after Rogers graduated from Yale, he returned to Yale Rep to star in “Figaro/Figaro,” an audacious mashup of Beaumarchais’ 1778 “The Marriage of Figaro” and Ödön von Horváth’s 1936 dark comedy “Figaro Gets a Divorce.” He came back in 1995 to co-star with Laura Linney in John Guare’s “Landscape of the Body.” The next time he was in New Haven he was at the Shubert Theatre in the pre-Broadway tour of Neil Simon’s 1997 comedy “Proposals,” the first of numerous Broadway shows for Rogers. The actor reunited with his student “Stage Door” director Mark Rucker for “Rough Crossing” at Yale Rep in 2008. Rogers also appeared in the world premiere of Carly Mensch’s “Oblivion” at Westport Country Playhouse in 2013. His most recent Yale Rep show was the 2017 production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” directed by the Yale Rep’s artistic director James Bundy, using a new translation by Yale dramaturgy and dramatic criticism professor Paul Walsh.
“I don’t know if I’d’ve wanted to do ‘Enemy of the People’ if it was not that Paul Walsh translation,” Rogers said. Likewise, the people involved with this “Rhinoceros” were a big draw for him. He has known Diamond’s work for decades and, while he hasn’t worked with any of them before and they all attended the school after he did, the cast is stocked with fellow Yale drama school graduates. Elizabeth Stahlmann, a 2016 graduate who was in last year’s Yale Rep production of “The Inspector,” plays the lead female role in the play, Daisy. Tony Manna, whose five previous Rep shows include “Taming of the Shrew” and “These Paper Bullets!,” plays the proprietor of a cafe that is the site of a rhinoceros rampage. Current Geffen School of Drama students Jeremy A . Fuentes, Dorottya Ilosvai, Kimberly Vilbrun-François and Ameya Narkar are also in the cast. Non-Yalies in the cast include Will Dagger, Nicole Michelle Haskins, UConn School of Drama alumnus Richard Ruiz and Phillip Taratula in the pivotal role of Berenger’s friend Gene.
Diamond has taught at Yale’s drama school since 1991. Among the 20 shows she has directed at Yale Rep are works by such politically minded playwrights as Bertolt Brecht, Suzan-Lori Parks and Caryl Churchill. She also staged Charles Ludlam’s outlandish comedy “The Bourgeois Avant-Garde” in 1995.
Rogers said one of the images Diamond showed him when they discussed what “Rhinoceros” was about was the iconic 1989 “Tank Man” photo of a citizen standing in front of a government tank in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The actor compares the image of a man blocking a tank, an impulsive move of resistance by one person, to how Berenger has to maneuver, then openly question, the increasing aggressive and bizarre actions of his fellow townsfolk.
Rogers said that Donald Holder, the head of lighting design at the School of Drama who is the lighting designer for “Rhinoceros,” is using “imagery that’s very film noir, shadowy, sort of like Orson Welles’ ‘The Trial,’ he said. “It’s a cityscape, with all these characters circling each other.” The production also features choreography by Yale-based dancer/choreographer Emily Coates.
At the same time, “Rhinoceros” is “a farce, a tragic farce but absolutely a farce,” Rogers said. “We’re trying to be funny where we can. I’m more of the straight man here, so it’s hard for me not to be funny. I’m the everyman character meant to represent all of us. This is an existentialist play. People are questioning the meaning of life.”
Rogers has a lot of experience with comic plays that also have a social message, and he’s played his share of characters that stand up to authority, yet he’s never performed in an Ionesco play. He remembers seeing an Ionesco play once in his youth and said it blew his mind. Otherwise, he said “I had to go back to the books,” studying texts such as Martin Esslin’s 1961 book of critical analysis “The Theatre of the Absurd,” which gives Ionesco his own chapter alongside fellow mid-20th century absurdist playwrights Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter.
From the research to the rampaging rhinos, Rogers is finding rehearsals of “Rhinoceros” at Yale Rep to be not just a challenge but a dream. “It unravels and unravels and unravels to get to this personal meaning, to get Ionesco’s message out,” he said.
“Rhinoceros” by Eugène Ionesco, directed by Liz Diamond and starring Reg Rogers, runs March 6-28 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. $35-$65, $15 for students. yalerep.org.