September 08, 2014
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Rhinos on the March
by Jim Rutter

At times, political movements have terrified, and resisting them required courage.

That's just one - and perhaps the most concrete - takeaway from Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's wild, disturbing production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros.

The Romanian-born Ionesco wrote his classic of absurdist theater in 1959; Europe was still recovering from the horrific mass movements called Nazism and fascism, and the post-WWII surge of the Communist Party in the playwright's adopted country of France had catapulted it to the forefront of politics there.

In Rhinoceros, as friends Berenger and Jean argue over some minor matter near the village square, their escalating fray is interrupted when a rhinoceros tears across the square. Then another appears, and gradually almost all the villagers, layabouts and good citizens alike, are transformed by an epidemic of "rhinoceritis" and become rampaging beasts, wrecking buildings, trampling animals, ruining the economy.

Maria Shaplin's lighting, Tina Brock's eerie sound design, and Lisa Glover's rhinoceros masks capture, in Twilight Zone style, the sheer terror of conformity, of watching friends, families, whole towns swallowed up by a movement. At times, Brock's direction accelerates the pace too quickly, rushing through three acts in 100 intermissionless minutes. But she grasps the humor and the horror; this play will captivate, rivet, frighten, and confuse.

Ionesco touches on some recurring themes from his other works: anxiety, the equivalence of logic and morality, isolation, despair, and indoctrination assured by violence. As the everyman Berenger (a recurring Ionesco character), Ethan Lipkin generates sympathy for his confused, outsider status; a nonconformist mostly by inertia and habit, he is left outside of social movements, and yet, unwillingly, is most affected by them.

Berenger, who resists, and his friend Jean (a fantastic performance by David Stanger), who succumbs, provide a personal reflection of the damage wrought by mass movements.

If it sounds hard to comprehend, perhaps that's the play's indictment of the current climate. Politics once could create a cold civil war, dividing families, wrecking friendships, pitting groups in fierce battles that flooded public squares. Participation used to require more than unfriending "dissidents," posting on Tumblr, or complaining on Reddit. And resistance? A bit more muster than that.

Through Sept. 21 at the Skybox at the Adrienne Theatre, 2030 Sansom St. Tickets: $22-$25.
Information: 215-285-0472 or idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org

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September 8, 2014
WHYY Newsworks: Shapiro on Theater
Fringe Festival reviews: 'Rhinoceros'
by Howard Shapiro

The breezy version of "Rhinoceros" from the city's Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium maintains some of its playfulness even at the end, when playwright Eugène Ionesco leaves one man standing alone against the rampaging creatures of the play's title. But the production is by no means Ionesco Lite.

Rather, it's a look at human nature that avoids a lecturish tone. In 1960, Ionesco wrote his play about a community whose residents turn into stampeding pachyderms. As an example of Theater of the Absurd, "Rhinoceros" is a guiding light for playwrights in a Fringe Festival: avant-garde, but highly focused and with a purpose. Ionesco wrote it to show the way a community adopts a faddish, reprehensible standard. In this case, he was referring to recent history -- the Nazis and fascism.

At first the townsfolk resist the beasts or even deny their existence, and ultimately they join them. "Rhinoceros" is about throwing out the baby, the bath water and finally yourself.

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy production casts Ethan Lipkin as Berenger, the weak-willed but good-hearted man confronting the herd of rhinos he once knew as neighbors, colleagues and friends. Tina Brock, who heads the stage company, directs this version and is responsible for its smooth feel. She has an able partner in Lipkin, a large presence (traditional for the role) who creates a likeable character that is more teddy bear than heavy hitter. We can identify with him easily.

Although you could attach current issues to the play, you can also see it as a fable simply about human behavior. Idiopathic Ridiculopathy does well to highlight the silly side of the residents, particularly their penchant for arguing over every aspect of an issue but not the issue itself. Steve Lippe plays an illogical logician, Bob Schmidt is a know-it-all naysayer, and Jerry Rudasill portrays a demanding boss whose reaction to the animals' destruction is that the builders should have put a better staircase onto his offices. David Stanger is the self-righteous friend whose idea of a social interchange is all about him, and Kirsten Quinn is the understanding heartthrob. Rounding out the cast are Paul McElwee, Maryruth Stine, Thomas Dura and Michael Dura.

The 100-minute production, without intermission, unfolds on a clever set that has movable flaps to show different places. Erica Hoelscher designed it along with the costumes, whose rhino headpieces are nifty. Brock, the director, also designed the sound, which nicely throws the plot into rhino-attack mode whenever Ionesco calls for it.

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"Rhinoceros," from the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, runs through Sept. 21 at the Adrienne Theater, on Sansom Street between 20th and 21st Streets.

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Sunday, September 7, 2014
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jawnts: Staging of a political play
By Jake Blumgart

Fringe season is upon us. For those who don't know: It's a sprawling festival devoted to innovative performance and modeled on an even more epic version in Edinburgh.
The performances are divided into "presented" productions, which generally enjoy the full weight of the festival's apparatus (including funds). Then there are "neighborhood" performances, which tend to be undertaken by locals who pay $350 to be included in the glossy catalog and for some light administrative support.

This year the presented side of Fringe is smaller than ever and offers relatively few local shows. But Philadelphia stalwarts Pig Iron Theater Company and New Paradise Laboratories are both offering typically engrossing affairs. The latter's long-developed The Adults offers a riff on a fractious, booze-drenched vacation. The action is informed by Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and the slightly grotesque oceanside paintings of Eric Fischl.

Fringe's neighborhood offerings are too numerous to be recounted, but the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's rendition of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros is worth a look.

The two-hour play is a bit of a mixed bag. It contains a lot of fatiguing shouting in its middle section and feels a bit overlong as a result. The cast is mostly good and Ethan Lipkin shines as Ionesco's multiplay leading man Berenger, here a charmingly oafish town drunk. The set is great but the costumes are even better, especially the rhinoceros outfits that become more commonplace as the story unfolds.
The play is set in a provincial French town that is suddenly beset by marauding rhinoceri. It soon becomes evident that the townspeople are transforming themselves into the beasts, a trend that accelerates as more adherents join the movement. Unlike Ionesco's famous Bald Soprano - which is basically absurdist gibberish - Rhinoceros is a clear political parable for the allure of fascism and other powerful authoritarian movements.

Rhinoceros is based on Ionesco's teenage years in 1930s Romania. As he told Paris Review in the 1980s, "Everyone was becoming pro-Nazi - writers, teachers, biologists, historians. . . . The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?"

At this year's Fringe, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium takes up that very question.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20140907_Jawnts__Staging_of_a_political_play.html#tQsgEUOC1HuwoU4w.99

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September 6, 2014
PHINDIE
RHINOCEROS: Fringe Review 5
by Debra Miller

Director Tina Brock brings spot-on casting, lightning-quick pacing, and non-stop hysteria (of both the panicked and hilarious varieties) to Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s FringeArts production of Eugène Ionesco’s RHINOCEROS. The devastating consequences of mindless conformity, social apathy, and turning a blind eye to a growing threat are the important themes of the darkly comic Theater of the Absurd masterpiece. Though the 1959 classic was originally intended as a critical reflection on the unchecked surge of Nazism pre-World War II, its messages of personal responsibility and ethical humanism remain relevant today, and Brock’s expert absurdist ensemble captures its timeless truths and sardonic wit in spades.

When a provincial French town is faced with an epidemic of “rhinoceritis” (humans transforming into beasts), its citizens at first react with alarm, but then apply questionable logic to the problem, and eventually accept and embrace the mass metamorphosis, charmed by the invading animals into a defeatist “if-you- can’t- beat-‘em- join-‘em” attitude and a survivalist instinct to number among the majority. Distracted by nonsensical syllogisms and pedantry (Was the animal Asiatic or African? Did it have one horn or two? Did you see a single rhino or two different ones?), the tightly-wound quarrelsome characters evade the real issues and imminent dangers, while the slovenly Bérenger alone, who at first suffers from immobilizing ennui and uses alcohol to cope, comes to recognize his responsibility to the future of humankind and remains committed to his own individuality and moral fiber.

Each and every member of the cast delivers a perfect balance of full-blown ridiculousness and profound meaning to Ionesco’s complex script and demanding roles. Steve Lippe as the Logician, Bob Schmidt as Botard, and Paul McElwee as the Old Gentleman skillfully epitomize the absurdity of faulty reasoning and the failure of structured hypothetical logic to solve actual problems. Jerry Rudasill (as the Waitress) and Tomas Dura (as the wives to Michael Dura’s Grocer and Old Man) make sidesplitting appearances in drag, in terrific costumes by Erica Hoelscher. The multi-talented Hoelscher also designed the smart set, inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s perspective sketch for The Adoration of the Magi (recalling the height of civilization, knowledge, and Humanism, as a telling disparity with the prevailing animalistic lunacy in the play). Maryruth Stine as Mrs. Boeuf happily joins her husband as one of the first in the village to make the change from person to beast, and Kirsten Quinn as Daisy at last succumbs to the switch, deftly manifesting the physical and psychological signs of her mutation.

The superb David Stanger and Ethan Lipkin shine in their starring roles as the antithetical friends Jean and Bérenger. Stanger is ever masterful in his characterization of the egomaniacal dandy, with every gesture, posture, facial expression, and tone of voice exhibiting self-assumed superiority and condescension. His consummate conversion from an emotionally volatile man into the tough-skinned, bellowing creature is a revelation. Lipkin is eminently sympathetic as the lone exemplar of ascending virtue; he is funny, sad, and ultimately meritorious, delivering the closing soliloquy with heartfelt conviction, as he rejects his society’s widespread decline into bestiality with the powerful proclamation, “I am not capitulating!”

Theater of the Absurd doesn’t get any better than this, and IRC, now in its eighth season, is THE company to watch. [Skybox at The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 3rd floor]; September 2-21, 2014. http://fringearts.com/event/eugene-ionescos-rhinoceros-18/.

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Reviews @ Rhinoceros:

Rhinos on the march - The Philadelphia Inquirer  by Jim Rutter

Fringe, Reviewed: Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros - Philadelphia City Paper by Mark Cofta

Fringe Festival Reviews: Rhinoceros and White Rabbit/Red Rabbit - Newsworks.org by Howard Shapiro

Rhinoceros - Fringe Review - Phindie.com by Debra Miller

Fringe Festival: ‘White Rabbit Red Rabbit’ and ‘Rhinoceros’ - Broad Street Review by Carol Rocamora

Back of the Ticket Review by Jessica Foley

Absurd is the new normal - Broad Street Review by Alaina Mabaso

Jawnts: Staging of a Political Play - The Philadelphia Inquirer by Jake Blumgart

Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros at its Most Ridiculopathic - Philebrity.com

The Power of the Playwright's Voice - Broad Street Review by Carol Rocamora

Rhinoceros — Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Adrienne - Nealspaper.com by Neal Zoren

Fringe Bike Tour Was Awesome - Phindie.com by Julius Ferraro

Give the Rhinos a Chance: Interview with the actors of Ionesco's Rhinoceros - Phindie.com by Henrik Eger

On Becoming a Rhinoceros: Interview with director Tina Brock - Phindie.com by Henrik Eger

When Language Goes… - Broad Street Review by Robert Zaller

Advance press @ Rhinoceros:

New and Noteworthy - The Philadelphia Inquirer

17 shows I want to see at the 2014 Fringe festival  - Newsworks.org  by Howard Shapiro

Weekly Entertainment Guide - Fringe Sampler & September Festivals - Newsworks.org  by Robin Bloom

FringeArts 2014 - University City Review  by John Lane

15 Top Picks for 2014 Fringe Festival - Phindie.com  by Debra Miller

Fringe Picks: Shameless Plugs and Insider Tips - Phindie.com  by Daniel Student

Foley’s Fringe Binge 2014  by Jessica Foley

Classic hysteria in Ionesco’s #Rhinoceros - Rep Radio Interview with Tina Brock  by Ken Cohen

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