Dining with Rhinoceros (Ionescu's play for today's Murika)

[robbedvoter]

Ionesco and the Empire


Dining With the Rhinos


By JOE BAGEANT


Thanks to an online friend, I recently rediscovered Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros-the one about being fully human in a totalitarian state. Berenger, the play's protagonist, is a humanist stranded in a society slowly becoming monsters. Rhinoceroses to be exact, a symbol for a herding mindless ugliness in an unthinking stampede. Ultimately Berenger is the last pink flesh and blood man left in a stampeding rhinoceros herd, and comes to grasp that the stampede itself is what it is all about. It is the stampede, the mindless charging off together that causes the metamorphosis of people into rhinos.


Americans at the time, 1959, saw Rhinoceros as a play about their favorite theme, individualism. Ionesco tried to tell critics that it was a play "not merely against conformism but mainly about totalitarianism," and that the very notion of a government or state proclaiming individualism as one of its national virtues is in itself absurd. To which U.S. critics replied that totalitarianism cannot happen here because America is a nation of individualists, thus proving Ionesco's point more
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant12042004.html

[aquart]

1. Wondered when someone would notice that script.

[robbedvoter]

2. We put this as the school play - Ionesco is my compatriot

Been thinking about it a lot lately - especially since the epidemic of "let's rethink this and that so they stampede with us not on us"

Some of the points in this article are amazingly sharp. Especially the absurdity of the "state sanctioned individualism"

[DBoon]

3. Saw a revival of this a few years ago

At the Odyssey in LA.

Absolutely the best political theater I've ever seen. Especially the leftist character who became a rhinoceros so he could "change them from within"

Ever time I hear some dire political news I think, "did a rhinoceros just go by?".

[robbedvoter]

4. And that is happening a lot now a days, isn't it?

"We need to speak their language ....."