Title
Playwright
Eugene Ionesco
Performance Dates
July 5-8, 1967
Creative Team
Director - William Brasmer
Designer - Deena Ferrigno
Synopsis
Rhinoceros (French original title Rhinocéros) is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant garde drama, "The Theatre of the Absurd", although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality.
Rhinoceros (play). (2017, June 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:53, June 14, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rhinoceros_(play)&oldid=785433576
Disciplines
Acting | Theatre and Performance Studies | Theatre History
Keywords
College Theater, Otterbein University Theater, Drama
Recommended Citation
Otterbein University Theatre and Dance Department, "Rhinoceros" (1967). 1967 Summer Theatre. 4.
https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/summer_production_1967/4