Everyone Has Their Reasons

I have a sneaking feeling that the Cambridge audience at the ART’s stellar production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros should perhaps have found it more disturbing than they did.

It’s not that they weren’t disturbed by the striking move Ionesco makes from farce to horror, but it can be a bit too easy to see the fable as one that depicts how other people—certainly not us!—conform and adapt to a new political and social reality.

To back up, in case you haven’t read or seen Rhinoceros lately: Ionesco, one of the great practitioners of the French Theater of the Absurd, wrote the play in 1959, drawing on his experience of the growth of fascism in the 1930s as well as on the French intellectual embrace of Stalinism in the 1950s.

The play begins like a bit of drawing-room comedy, or better (it is French, after all), as a café comedy. Friends Jean and Berenger (Paul Giamatti and John Turturro, both outstanding) meet for a drink at a café in the center of their provincial small town. As the buttoned-up Jean berates his disheveled friend, they are interrupted by a rhinoceros running through town. Then another. Or was it the same one, coming back from the opposite direction? Did the first have one horn and the second two horns, and does that mean the one is African and the other Asiatic? Or the other way around?

Diane Paulus’s adaptation has streamlined the original French, which gets even sillier, given the presence of a logician at another table using a set of syllogisms to convince his willing pupil that Socrates was a cat. I missed this part of the original, which establishes early on how easily the trappings of rational argument can be used to make nonsense seem reasonable.

But she retains what would almost seem invented for this American version (but no, it is part of Ionesco’s original) in the next scene, when Berenger’s office mates read about the stampede in the morning paper and debate whether it really happened. “I never believe journalists,” says his colleague Botard. “I don’t need them to tell me what to think.”

But as more rhinoceroses appear and it becomes clear that many townspeople are undergoing a process of rhinocerification, the play’s tone shifts into a more ominous register. It’s with a mix of distress and hilarity that we watch Paul Giamatti’s tour de force transformation into a rhinoceros just before intermission (Paulus has compressed Ionesco’s first two acts into one.)

No make-up or prosthetics here, just an occasional amplification of Giamatti’s voice as it begins to transform into a snort. With bated breath and bursts of uncomfortable laughter, we watch him begin to paw the ground, charge his friend, even rut against him as he reveals his inner Nietzsche, his secret admiration for superhuman strength over his accustomed respectability. It’s Jean’s sustained willingness to surrender his humanity that leaves us breathless as the curtain falls.

The humorous farce is long gone as Act II begins.

Berenger is holed up in his apartment tormented by nightmares of turning into a rhinoceros himself. His two remaining human colleagues, Dudard and Daisy, come to visit, but both eventually leave to join the rhinos.

Dudard and Daisy give their reasons, just as Jean did, but we might better speak of “reasons” since each is simply justifying an inner desire. Where Jean admired power, Dudard wants to be the reasonable man who accepts the inevitable, and Daisy simply wants to join in the fun the rhinos seem to be having.

In her Director’s Note, Paulus notes that Turturro came to the rehearsals with a quotation from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in mind: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Paulus has clearly kept that idea in mind. We all have our reasons for joining the tribe we do, and it may only be from outside that we see how others have rationalized their choice.

But what about Berenger? The curtain falls on his defiance. How is it that this slacker becomes the sole holdout?

I don’t think Ionesco answers that question for us. Intriguingly, Berenger is the character least at home in argument. He acts rather on intuition, and his intuition throughout is a human one.

But is that intuition enough to save us when the rhinoceroses come?