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2019-05-16

Writing on the Walls: Reimagining Eugène Ionesco’s

Rhinoceros

Anastasakis, Constantine Xionis

Anastasakis, C. X. (2019). Writing on the Walls: Reimagining Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

(Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110326

master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Writing on the Walls:

Reimagining Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

by

Constantine Xionis Anastasakis

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTERS OF FINE ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA

CALGARY, ALBERTA

MAY, 2019

© Constantine Xionis Anastasakis 2019

ii

Abstract

This artist’s statement is a critical reflection on the creative process that culminated in the

staging of Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros at the University of Calgary’s Reeve Theatre from

November 30th to December 8th, 2019. The first chapter introduces my initial ideas and

approaches to the production at the beginnings of my research, and how these ideas evolved

based on my experience(s) in Greece. The second chapter contextualizes the play within my

research, including Eugene Ionesco’s body of work, the contemporary social, political, and

cultural framework that informed the reconceptualization, specifically Greece’s debt crisis and

the resultant unrest evident in Athens’ graffiti and protest-turned-riots. The third chapter focuses

on revisions, additions, and reinterpretations of the text that manifested in the production. The

fourth chapter outlines the collaborative process with designers, actors, and academics moving

from rehearsal to performance. The final chapter reflects on the successes, failures, lessons, and

thoughts following the performance run with regard to my intended outcome for the play.

In adherence to departmental guidelines the names of all undergraduate student artists

involved in the creative process have been omitted from the document and are instead referred to

by their title within the production, i.e., lighting designer, stage manager, etc.

iii

Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Constantine X. Anastasakis.

iv

Acknowledgements

I am infinitely grateful to and inspired by the undergraduate artists that brought their

boundless imaginations, unwavering commitment, uplifting positivity, and unconditional trust to

undertaking such a radical departure from convention: Jaden Sullivan, Oderin Tobin, Nicole

Rathgeber, Mackenzie MacDonald, Elizabet Rajchel, Autumn Sali, Ethan Ross, Tyrone Copping,

Donna Ng, Cindy Ansah, and Hannah Isbister. Thank you for breathing life into these archetypes

and for animating this strange new world with your quirks and eccentricities.

To our choreographer, for her emboldening leadership and effortless grace; to our

assistant director, for being the eyes in the back of my head; to our stage manager, without whom

we would have surely been lost; to our set and props designer, Scott Reid, for saying ‘yes’ far

more often than ‘no’; to our costume designer, Jennifer Lee Arsenault, for building each one of

the rhinoceros masks by hand; to our sound designer, Luke Dahlgren, for cutting the Zorba

theme from the pre-show; and to our lighting designer, for her deeply refreshing ambition and

iron-clad integrity. Thank you all for fortifying against the tempests and weathering the droughts.

I am indebted to my supervisor, Christine Brubaker, for encouraging me to be irreverent

and uncompromising in my artistic pursuits; and, to my co-supervisor, Valerie Campbell, for

taking a chance on me a year earlier, and for putting the fire under my ass to pursue grad school.

Your coaching, guidance, and compassion over the last two years have made all the difference.

Thank you to Mike Czuba for converting me into a ‘precisionist’; to Jennifer Brewin for

introducing us to the basics of clowning; to Alyssa Bradac for teaching me to “be brave, [and]

show up”; and to Zachary McKendrick for talking me off the ledge many, many times.

And to my wife, Niah, for being equal parts sounding-board, editor, therapist,

collaborator, and best friend through the last two years; I could not have done this without you.

v

Dedication

For my grandmother,

Carol Xionis,

Who instilled in me my appetite for irreverent storytelling.

And

For Jim Senft,

Who rekindled my passion for theatre, introduced me to directing, and taught me the importance

of a unified ensemble.

Dare Est Recipere.

vi

Table of Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ iiPreface ............................................................................................................................................. iiiAcknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ivDedication ........................................................................................................................................ vTable of Contents ............................................................................................................................ viList of Figures and Illustrations ..................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................1 CHAPTER TWO: (RE)IMAGINING IONESCO ...............................................................9

Discerning the Director’s Role ...................................................................................9Eugène Ionesco, the Playwright ...............................................................................15(Re)Defining Absurdism ..........................................................................................19Challenging the Accepted Interpretation of the Text ...............................................23Ionesco’s Bérenger: Everyman, or Proxy? ...............................................................26Peripheral Theatre and Woyzeck ...............................................................................32Understanding Greece’s Economic Crisis ................................................................34On Metamorphosis and Allegory .............................................................................35

CHAPTER THREE: (RE)VISIONS ..................................................................................39 CHAPTER FOUR: (RE)DIRECTING RHINOCEROS .....................................................53

Collaborating with Designers ...................................................................................53The Set and Props Design ........................................................................................54The Costume Design ................................................................................................60The Lighting Design .................................................................................................63The Sound Design ....................................................................................................65Mapping Out the Rehearsal Process .........................................................................69Auditions and Callbacks ...........................................................................................71Script Cuts and Table Work .....................................................................................74Negotiating the Work of the Actor ...........................................................................75Rehearsing in the University Theatre .......................................................................79Choreographing the ‘Flocking’ and the ‘Rioting’ Sequences ..................................80Integrating the Silent Chorus ....................................................................................84Integrating Coaches ..................................................................................................85Tech Week and ‘The Violence of Decision Making’ ...............................................89

CHAPTER FIVE: REFLECTION .....................................................................................92

Toppling the Dominos ..............................................................................................92Final Thoughts ..........................................................................................................94

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................... 97Works Consulted ............................................................................................................................ 98Appendix ...................................................................................................................................... 105

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List of Figures and Illustrations

Fig. 1 The first rhinoceros appears, with ensemble ‘flocking’ ...................................................... 99Fig. 2 The rhinoceroses pass through the square, with ensemble ‘flocking’ ................................. 99Fig. 3 The Logician explains the potential combinations of rhinoceroses ................................... 100Fig. 4 Daisy reads Kafka, Jean rebukes Bérenger, and Logician tutors Old Gentleman ............. 100Fig. 5 The townspeople console the Housewife on the death of her cat ...................................... 101Fig. 6 The office staircase collapses ............................................................................................ 101Fig. 7 Jean conceals the rhinoceroses from Bérenger .................................................................. 102Fig. 8 Jean’s Transformation ....................................................................................................... 102Fig. 9 Bérenger, Dudard, and Daisy discuss the news on the TV ................................................ 103Fig. 10 Bérenger watches Mr. Papillion protesting on TV .......................................................... 103Fig. 11 The rhinoceroses dance a traditional Καλαµατιανό ......................................................... 104Fig. 12 The rhinoceroses offer Bérenger kinship ......................................................................... 104

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Theatre does not exist in a vacuum: it is a social art form that empowers us to examine

ourselves in relation to other people and the world we live in. Theatre allocates spaces for us to

encounter subjects, people, conflicts, etc., that we may be otherwise reluctant to encounter in

reality. Theatre has the ability to immerse us in a myriad of potential futures without forcing us

to live in any of them beyond the applause at the end of the microcosm that is a play. In addition

to showing us futures, it can elucidate lost details of the past, and even reflect back to us a clearer

vision or alternate version, of our own present. In this sense, theatre is a transcendental art form,

but like all art forms, it relies on a breathing audience to ascribe meaning to what is presented.

Because theatre artists typically create theatre with the understanding and for the purpose of it

being shared with an audience, it seems that the most pivotal, foundational point of theatre is the

conversation it generates. Therefore, the potency of a theatrical experience lies in the bond

between performer and audience and in establishing the trust that both have permission to allow

themselves to be vulnerable, to be outraged, to be seduced, to laugh, to cry, but ultimately to

connect. As an artist, I feel it is my duty to begin with the truths in myself if I stand any chance

of inspiring audiences to unearth the truths in themselves.

I first encountered Rhinoceros several years ago and upon reading it felt simultaneously

dizzied by the scope of technical elements that the script demanded, intrigued by the subtlety of

the underlying themes, the staging challenges present in coordinating the town square scene, the

collapsing staircase, the trampled cat, as well as pleasantly confused by the absurdity of the

central metaphor of the rhinoceroses themselves. It felt like reading a musical without the score,

and I immediately felt a strong connection between the townspeople, the rhinoceroses, and the

convention of the chorus from both classical Greek theatre and Broadway traditions. The writing

2

was lyrical, the proliferation of pachyderms was balletic, and the central character had all the

classic symptoms of a tragic hero without the satisfaction of sincere, cathartic self-realization.

But as much as I was taken by the script I knew I would not have access to the capital I would

need to produce it the way I envisioned it anytime in the near future, so I shelved it.

It was not until last year that I revisited the script as a project proposal for a staged

reading. Still intimidated by the scale that the script demanded, I thought that a staged reading

might be easier to execute and allow me to dig into the text without needing to contend with the

daunting element of staging. A staged reading of Rhinoceros still proved to be a difficult

undertaking as the first scene calls for ten characters that are all more or less onstage and

speaking at the same time, meaning I would need a minimum of ten actors. After a week of

trying unsuccessfully to rally enough student actors to fill the roles and navigate their schedules,

I once again shelved Rhinoceros and opted for a more manageable Ionesco play, The Chairs.

This play is significantly shorter and only calls for three actors, one of whom is silent. For the

staged reading, I chose to cast the actor reading stage directions in the role of the mute orator. It

was through this experience that I acquainted myself with Ionesco’s brand of humour and all the

layers underpinning it. I took a minimalist approach to the staged reading: two chairs and two

music stands for the actors, a black box, a chalk board with a drawing of the stage diagram

Ionesco includes in the opening stage directions—allowing the mute orator to draw additional

chairs in chalk as the reading progressed—and an audience seating configuration that ostensibly

cornered the actors in the space and consisted of far more chairs than I hoped to fill in order to

give the sense of an empty auditorium.

After directing the staged reading of The Chairs, Rhinoceros felt more approachable as I

felt I had zeroed in on the rhythm of the writing, the tongue-in-cheek tenor, and the use of

3

extended metaphor as a means of communicating the deeper themes without being overt.

Knowing the resources that I would have at my disposal, I could no longer use the excuse of its

size as a cop out for tackling such a challenging script. All of my thesis proposals were ambitious

because I knew I wanted to take full advantage of the resources available to me, and Rhinoceros

felt consistent with my directorial style and goals in that respect. Up until that point, my directing

experience had almost exclusively been on small-budget productions with small casts and I knew

that if I had aspirations to direct in larger theatres, I would need to prove myself competent

enough to undertake a large-scale production, and what better time to try this than in a safe and

supportive environment that encourages students to take bold artistic risks and push boundaries.

I proposed Rhinoceros with every intention of staging an interpretation of the play that

remained faithful to the intentions of the playwright while still exercising some artistic license: in

light of their contemporary political situation, I imagined the metamorphoses of the citizens of

Ionesco’s French town into rhinoceroses as paralleling the cultural and ideological rifts in the

national identity of our neighbours to the South. Following the current president’s populist

campaign (and subsequent election to office) making use of xenophobic rhetoric, ultra-nationalist

propaganda, and with a façade of candidness to underscore an aggression passed-off as fervour,

the parallel seemed obvious given the central themes of the play. As an American-born artist

living in Canada, this interpretation felt contemporarily relevant and topical, but, admittedly, a

little too easy. The over-saturation of news media coverage on Donald Trump’s presidency made

this concept seem to me to be too obvious and lacking any real challenge or depth. With this

approach, there is nothing new being plumbed or discussed, but simply a parallel being drawn

between Ionesco’s text and the demagoguery and populism at the forefront of the current

American government. Transplanting American politics into Rhinoceros may have worked more

4

seamlessly as an adaptation, but the price of that seamlessness would have compromised the

message and its potency; I do not believe it would have challenged anyone to really think

differently about either element. Furthermore, to suggest that a proliferation of rhinoceroses

disturbing the peaceful and idyllic status quo of a town, would have been to suggest that America

was without contention before Trump, which, to me, feels demonstrably inaccurate.

The irreconcilable problem I encountered with the American approach was the play’s

protagonist: Bérenger. Initially, I read Bérenger as an idealist, holding out against the forces of

corruption that have overtaken his world, and it was not until I began exploring a new context

that I started to see Bérenger as a stationary character in a world that is changing rapidly around

him; it was in this simplification that I was able to strip away judgment and look at his role in the

world with that distance. Bérenger’s character arc and the way in which an audience is meant to

encounter him depends so heavily on the nature of the change happening around him—that

which he is refusing to capitulate to—which made me rethink the nature of the change and how

that would affect the way Bérenger was received. If the radical and momentous change is wholly

positive, or in opposition to something negative, what does Bérenger’s resistance stand for? As a

visual metaphor, can the rhinoceroses represent a sympathetic cause? These questions allowed

me to understand Bérenger as an antithesis to this movement.

Two months before beginning rehearsals for Rhinoceros, my wife and I spent a month in

Greece for our honeymoon, which, for me, felt like an overdue homecoming as ten years had

passed since my last visit. Everything was different but nothing had really changed. Revisiting a

country that has had such a profound impact on my upbringing and identity as an adult with all

the perspective that comes with growing up was revelatory, and served to disrupt my own

conceptions about Greece and how I remembered it.

5

We bookended our trip with stays in Athens and what struck me was the dichotomy of

the classical and the contemporary and their coexistence in a functioning modern city: we saw

the ruins of the Roman and Ancient Agoras of Athens, and just outside the enclosure found

ourselves in a modern neighbourhood covered in graffiti murals; the remnants of Hadrian’s

Library are minutes away on foot from the train platform at Monastiraki, a popular shopping

district in Athens; and in the center of it all, on a hill overlooking the city is the Acropolis itself. I

found myself surrounded all at once by the ruins of an ancient culture and the ghosts of my own

past, and all I could pay attention to was the prevalent graffiti. The trains, the buildings, the

sidewalks, everything but the monuments themselves, were tagged. The graffiti fell into one of

three categories: artfully crafted murals (including the likeness of a mechanical rhinoceros

billowing steam from its nostrils on Crete); haphazardly scrawled profanity in support of soccer

clubs; and antifascist youth rebellion graffiti that varied in style and content, but all the same,

expressing common phrases of discontent. The graffiti in Athens inspired me to recontextualize

Bérenger’s resistance and raise some important questions with my interpretation of the text.

A shopkeeper sold me a Greek translation of Rhinoceros and I took the opportunity to ask

him how he felt about the graffiti. He looked at me over his glasses, a playful smirk curled on the

edges of his mouth, as if we were sharing in an inside joke, and without missing a beat, answered

me in English, “Can you read what it says?” The graffiti he was referring to read: “ΟΛΕΣ ΟΙ

ΑΞΙΕΣ ΑΥΤΗΣ ΤΗΣ ΚΟΙΝΟΝΙΑΣ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΦΥΛΑΚΕΣ ΥΨΙΣΤΗΣ ΑΣΦΑΛΕΙΑΣ,” which in

English roughly translates to “the merits of this community are high security prisons,” featuring,

as many of the wall pieces did, the letter ‘A’ fashioned into the anarchy symbol. I was not

expecting this reaction from a fifty-plus business owner because of the connotations of graffiti in

Canada and the US. I have grown up conflating graffiti with vandalism and the act of defacing

6

public infrastructure as a frivolous act of rebellion with little weight or validity, so to reassess

graffiti as a political reaction and decipher the writing on the walls as a forum for the

disenfranchised was something new to me.

I immediately drew a parallel between the rhinoceroses and the young people responsible

for the graffiti, which captured my imagination and prompted me to reconsider my interpretation

of the events of the play and how they unfold. Upon further examination of the text, I noticed

that there is very little objectively stated about the nature of the rhinoceroses beyond their

appearance. It did not feel like too much of an imposition to imprint on the rhinoceroses a new

identity and recast them as a symbol for a new kind of change. This idea was radical,

unconventional, and ineffably exciting, if not also somewhat terrifying and a little overwhelming

at this stage in my preparation. I had chosen a safe contextual parallel, one that everyone would

be able to identify with, but as a result, had put myself in a position where I was going through

the paces. This disruption renewed my enthusiasm for the play in that it inspired me to

obsessively backtrack and reconsider every detail to make sure that there was a continuity of

ideas that matched the text’s trajectory. Part of the fixation I had developed on this idea became

that, because it was not a perfect fit, I would need to strategically trim the text in such a way that

allowed the existing story to remain consistent while serving the new premise and without

compromising its integrity and making it unrecognizable.

An embarrassing fact to admit, given my Greek heritage and the premise of this

production’s commentary, is that before undertaking the research, I was only peripherally aware

of the economic crisis in Greece and its severity. I have always endowed Greece with an

intangible and borderline mythological quality, which does not lend itself to critically thinking

about the harsh realities they have had to face as a country through their current financial

7

downturn. So much of how I have always romanticized Greece is in contrast to how I have

thought of the United States and Canada. In my mind, Greece was this idyllic summer paradise

that as a family we would escape to, and the US and Canada felt like the reality I inevitably

always returned to. In many ways, this dichotomy has helped me to conceivably imagine the

absurdist reality of Ionesco’s world as taking place in Greece as opposed to anywhere else

because for me it is still very much and closely tied to the mythological qualities I grew up

ascribing it. Facing the realities of the economic crisis in Greece and the repercussions on its

people disturbed my idealized perception of Greece, and, in some ways, identifying with the

rhinoceroses, or rather humanizing the rhinoceroses, was a way to reconcile my perception of

Greece with the realities of their recent financial crisis.

I set Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Greece, in part as an attempt to grapple with and understand

the current political and financial struggles they are facing as a country, but also as a way to

reconnect with my heritage. I wanted to see if a play that is typically read as a commentary on

conformism and the rise of fascism could be reimagined and accepted by an audience as a

different kind of commentary, on a different kind of protagonist, as a way to challenge the idea

that a group that forms behind an ideology is automatically a bandwagon.

This conceptual disruption has become a trend in my work and has informed the way that

I approach theatre-making, especially with regard to reimagining classical and canonical

dramatic texts. Throughout my graduate studies, there have been three key projects that have

been cornerstones to the exploration of this impulse: the first, grappling with the supernatural in

Act One of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and reimagining the three guards in the first scene—Bernardo,

Marcellus, and Francisco—as conspirators in allegiance with Fortinbras who plots to fool

Hamlet into killing King Claudius by presenting him with a staged vision of the ghost of his

8

father (depicted by an armor-clad and ethereal-looking Francisco,) thus setting the stage for

Fortinbras to take the vacant throne at the end of the play; the second was my pre-thesis

production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, wherein I cast a woman in the role of the Drum Major,

underscored the entire piece with a live percussionist, and reimagined Woyzeck murdering Marie

at the end of the play as a psychotic break from reality, leading to an ill-advised episode where

he chases the murder weapon across a frozen pond before falling through the ice and drowning;

the third, and a culmination of the lessons I learned from those past experiences, was my thesis

production of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. This disruptive impulse has lead me to Peter M.

Boenisch’s book on Regie Theatre—as well as other thinkers and practitioners approaching this

kind of auteur directing style for stage such as Thomas Ostermeier, Avra Sidiropoulou, and

Patrice Pavis, among others—and to delve into Hans-Thies Lehmann’s ideas of a Post-Dramatic

theatre, as well as revisiting the convention and potential of repurposing the Greek chorus.

There is a staggering amount of contemporary work being written and produced for the

stage, yet we are still fascinated by and drawn to the classics. While I am of two minds about the

inherent value of and necessity for contemporaneity in theatrical work and likewise the sustained

relevance of classical plays, I think that the crossroads of my two interests is in the adaptation

and reimagining of canonical work. With Rhinoceros—it bears stating outright—I reimagined the

play with a sympathetic take on the rhinoceroses, who in my production represented the spirit of

the protests and riots in Athens in response to the Greek financial crisis. I was able to displace

the text and recontextualize the story to distil a new message and a new meaning, which is not to

say that the text no longer stands on its own, especially given the tumultuous time we live in, but

rather that this approach gave me agency as an artist to imprint upon it my own values and ideas

about the function of theatre in our modern world.

9

CHAPTER TWO: (RE)IMAGINING IONESCO

Discerning the Director’s Role

I first encountered theatre as a performer, and in the last ten years, I have endeavoured to

explore as many facets of the art form as possible. I fell in love with theatre via musicals; there’s

something enchanting about imagining everyday people so overcome with emotion that they

have no other alternative but to burst into song. Musical theatre had such a fundamental and

formative impact on my approach to theatre and has engrained itself so firmly in my thinking,

that I daresay my work will forever be coloured by it. This is evident in my choice of play—

featuring a town of people so overcome with misguided passion that they transform into

rhinoceroses—and the ways in which I chose to stage it.

Captivated by some of my favourite playwrights—Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Martin

McDonagh, to name just a few—and utterly romanced by the creative potential of the stage, I

experimented with writing my own plays. I wrote plays in the style of my influences, trying my

hand at their voice in an attempt to discover my own, thinking I’d find it in the form. From there,

as a means to seeing my written work staged, necessity threw me into the role of director, given

practically nonexistent budgets and sometimes concurrently taking on the roles of sound, set, and

costume designer. As a result, I have had a difficult time defining my artistic identity as a theatre

maker: Am I a performer? A playwright? A director? Or, am I some amalgam, and which should

I invest my focus on? Undertaking an MFA in directing felt like a way of committing to it as a

primary focus, but even throughout my time in this program, I have drawn on my experience

with playwriting, in part through taking on writing projects culminating in the completion of two

full-length plays—one in close collaboration with my supervisor—but also in applying structural

foundations I have developed as a writer to restructure and reimagine existing plays as a director.

10

The majority of my directing experience prior to entering the University of Calgary’s

graduate program was in staging workshops of my own writing, which has always given me an

inside track into the playwright’s intentions; directing works written by other playwrights came

with its own learning curve, but in many ways, I retained my impulse to distil the parts of the

narrative that I personally connect with and present the narrative in the way I understand it.

Within this paradigm lies the impetus for my impulse to disrupt canonical writing. Much of my

artistic practice as a director up until that point was informed by directors I had worked with as

an actor. To this extent, my approach to actor coaching was based in exercises and adapting

techniques based on ones I had personally encountered; my approach to text analysis was

paralleled by my writing initiatives and the study of narrative structure; my aesthetic tastes with

regard to staging have been informed by my tendencies toward symmetry as well as productions

I have seen and images from those productions that have stayed with me. My directorial

approach has been predominantly grounded in a reconciliation of all these impulses and

identities, and distilling them into something that can be cohesively understood. Both Rhinoceros

and my pre-thesis production, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, were built on this need to identify and

extract the essential story and tell it in the way I understand it rather than try to assume someone

else’s understanding. This coincides with recent feelings of irreverence toward authorial intent.

Even my own authority is diminished compared to what the audience seeing my work is able to

take away from it. I will naturally imprint myself on my artistic work, but I believe in the shared

ownership of stories and the absence of one absolute interpretation.

In an interview, Ionesco said “if you’re simply influenced by someone, you do not say

anything interesting or new,” (Radio-Canada, 1961) and I hinge my agreement with him on his

use of the word ‘simply’, but in my experience, there is nothing simple about influence in this art

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form. An artist can steal structure without content, intent without execution, problems without

solutions: Marquez’s Library of Babel gave artists of a postmodern age the scope and

pointlessness of attaining originality by introducing the idea of a hypothetical building where

every combination of words and letters had already been published, where words and letters are

just semiotic indicators for meaning and meaning is derived from the reader; Roland Barthes’

essay “Death of the Author” explored a similar paradigm, where “the birth of the reader must be

ransomed by the death of the author” (Barthes, 1258) which, from a literary perspective, means

giving the reader agency to imprint meaning that they derive from a story divorced from the

authorial intent. With this reimagining of Rhinoceros, I have put myself in the roles of both

reader and author in that I have chosen to present a new meaning to an audience for them to

imprint themselves on. I am interested in matching, or perhaps mismatching, form and content.

In his novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, one of my favorite authors,

Haruki Murakami, quotes Voltaire for saying “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation,”

and it is a quote that has stayed with me and shaped the way I integrate the ideas of practitioners

and theorists into my own thinking, and it bears stating that the irony of encountering it through

another author is not lost on me. I understand this quote to mean that it is not in the ‘imitation’

that new art emerges, but rather, in the careful curating of which influences to imitate and when

that imitation is serving the original work (and likewise, when it becomes derivative.)

Art impacts the consumers of art (by which I mean those that engage with art, i.e.,

audiences, collectors, purveyors, other artists, etc.,) through the personal context that they bring

to it; likewise, as a director, I find it critical when adapting a piece of text to find a personal

resonance within the text to inform why it is necessary to share and why I necessarily should be

the one to share it. Story is the medium through which we relate personal experiences, and has

12

value insofar as it is relatable to a spectator’s personal narrative. An important insight that has

shaped much of my thinking throughout these last two years of graduate studies is that creators

and consumers of art take the same approach to how they engage with it: the lynchpin being

personal resonance with their own narratives.

Beginning my graduate studies at the University of Calgary I found myself struggling

with imposter syndrome. I was reassured by both instructors and colleagues that this is common

among graduate students. I have also learned that the only way to be a director is to direct, and

that there is no singular and definitive methodology that is more correct than another. This was

an empowering sentiment because it meant that directing was experiential rather than rote

knowledge. I have had the privilege of sharing a working environment with exceptional artists

and thinkers, and the pressure of producing work at their caliber has come primarily from

myself. I approached Alyssa Bradac—a sessional professor and alumni of the graduate program

in directing whom I have an enormous amount of respect for— and expressed this self-doubt as

it had started to affect the confidence with which I am accustomed to in approaching my work;

because so much of a director’s job is leadership, I had difficulty mustering the confidence to

lead when I did not feel like I had any right to and this was negatively impacting my work. I do

not remember much of what was said that afternoon in her office, but what she was able to

imprint on me, beyond being a patient ear and offering encouragement, was that there is no one

‘right way’, only ‘my way’, and there is no right way to do my way. I remember a personal

mantra she offered her directing students a few weeks later that resonated with me and that I

have since adopted into my own practice: “Show up. Be brave.”

The way I conceive of the director’s role in a theatrical production is in distilling a

through-line from the narrative text and craft the overall storytelling on the stage to express that

13

end. A director is not a composer, but rather something more akin to an arranger; a collagist, a

quilter, a compiler. It is therefore the task of the director to knit the yarns of production design,

of text, of performance, etc., into something more resembling a unified, integrated piece. More

and more, as I find the space in my practice to collaborate with multidisciplinary artists, I am

finding the director’s role to be critical in the compilation and organization of disparate parts.

I believe a director’s role is to recreate and unite fragments of consciousness into a

cohesive, if not lucid, dream. A spectator’s role, arguably the most important one to the theatrical

experience, is to allow themselves to suspend their disbelief, acknowledge the fiction, and derive

meaning from there. An audience can be five-hundred people, or it can be one single person, but

they are what make theatrical experiences meaningful and give performers a partner in the

dialogue that they are engaging in. It is this contextual framework that affords me the proximity

to imagine something that each individual audience member can project themselves onto; at

least, this is the objective, or rather, a large part of how I approach theatre-making, and I find

there’s a fine line between universality and generality, and for me, where these two crossroads

meet, is truth. With regards to staging Rhinoceros, as much as I could theoretically grapple with

the themes of conformism and isolation at the center of the play, what resonated more for me,

was the strength in numbers, the courage to hold and stand behind an unpopular opinion, and the

transformation that happens in people unified behind a cause. If the cause is something positive

or uplifting, the play can be empowering, and it seems to me that empowerment is a more

productive sentiment (especially for younger audiences and performers alike that are wont to

attend an academic production of this ilk) than a feeling of overwhelming helplessness.

Every live audience is by definition contemporary and therefore informed by the milieu

of its time, and as such, experiences theatre through the lens which they use to experience the

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rest of the world. Part of what fascinates me about classical theatre texts—aside from the poetry,

the emerging conventions, and the insight into the people and societies for whom they were

written—is the universality of the human experience, and the fact that stories from a hundred

years ago can still be told and have an impact on and resonate with contemporary people dealing

with contemporary problems. And herein, for me, lies the power of theatre.

That said, a play—which is to say the published text—is dated from the moment it is

published, and is, as a result, a product of its time and the circumstances under which it was

written; whereas a production of a play—by which I mean the staged theatrical event—is by its

immediate and temporary nature necessarily contemporary to the moment of its performance. As

an artist, I believe that a contemporary audience warrants a contemporary theatre, which is not to

say that classical texts should no longer be produced, but rather, as we are seeing more

frequently, should be presented in such a way that does not alienate its audience in the interest of

historical accuracy. There are many ways that contemporary theatre makers accomplish this

temporal adaptation—informing the design with contemporary aesthetics or practices (staging

Shakespeare in an indoor theatre with electrical lighting is a choice made in the interest of

contemporizing material written more than four centuries ago), using found spaces, reframing the

context of the narrative, subversive casting choices, augmenting the text itself (translating,

cutting, reordering scenes, replacing words, etc.,) as well as a myriad of other innovative

techniques intended to make historical plays more accessible. Language is mutable and the

meaning of words is subject to change as a language evolves, but as theatre is a living art form, a

performed text will automatically be subject to the biases of the spectators. I believe these

innovations and alterations serve the text and their authors rather than overrule them. Many

opera houses now include surtitles for spectators that do not speak Italian, or French, or Russian,

15

etc., so that English speakers can enjoy the nuance of the text as the composer intended.

Contemporary audiences can only be expected to find meaning and relate to a story if on some

level they can identify with and understand the nature of the struggle. In the same respect, a play

written sixty years ago presented to a contemporary audience will be better served by an artist

who is able to colour it with a consideration and mindfulness of the audience’s contemporaneity

and the barriers that that might present. Not that Rhinoceros would be otherwise unintelligible

without an update, but in the interest of keeping theatre relevant, I believe that our approach to

theatre must stay up to date with the audiences in attendance, and offer something new.

I suspect my attitudes toward directing will change once I have left the academic setting

and started working professionally, and surely (hopefully) that will not be the last time they

change, but one thing that this MFA has afforded me is the space to work through some of these

ideas and explore what it means to think about the art beyond simply staging a play.

Eugène Ionesco, the Playwright

In an interview with Judith Jasmin for Radio-Canada in 1961, Ionesco described himself

as “timid and aggressive,” feeling “as if [he] were detached from the world and watching it as a

spectacle [he] can’t quite comprehend.” (Radio-Canada, 1961) In this interview, Ionesco

discusses his childhood, his aversion to the theatre, the nature of comedy and tragedy, and the

state of the world. He discusses his own feelings of detachment and isolation from other people,

and his disdain for populist movements that inundate what he calls “demi-intellectuals…not the

great intellects [earlier referring to Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Vercsone] but the professional

intellectuals.” Watching this interview gave me an impression of Ionesco as someone all at once

playful, articulate, and fiercely opinionated. From the moment I received approval to direct

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Rhinoceros, I was peripherally concerned with Ionesco’s approval, and found myself somewhat

paradoxically looking for validation in the playwright’s own philosophies on art and society to

support this production’s irreverent disregard for authorial intent. While I clearly have a great

deal of respect for Ionesco and the body of work he left the world, there was a moment when I

realized that I was still seeking out his approval to justify this production, and found myself

scrutinizing my desire for his permission to subvert his intentions.

Ionesco recalls attending a Punch and Judy puppet show as a foundational experience

with theatre as a child and expresses a contempt for modern theatre. “We’re all puppets…some

know they’re puppets; some do not want to be puppets.” (Radio-Canada, 1961) This coincided

with my approach to character creation in the play and representation completely coincidentally.

I wanted the characters’ movements and voices to be exaggerated, drawing from musical theatre

and pantomime, and to some extent, preserve their archetypal construction. Much like masks,

puppets tend to be created around a central quality that their unchanging physical appearance

reflects, and as such, come to be perceived as archetypal. Before I was aware of Ionesco’s

predilection for puppets, I envisioned these characters as stationary and unchanging. This

impulse can be traced back, structurally, to the way the play unfolds; we are shown shallow

personages in the majority of the characters with the exception of Bérenger, Jean, and Daisy, and

the rest transform before they are shown to undergo a change. Their transformations, and in

particular the uniformity of their transformations, seemed to suggest an effacement of their

quintessential qualities in lieu of a more homogenous façade, but it was the Logician’s hat

impaled on his horn and the exaggeration of Jean’s already present combativeness that made me

resist the idea of a complete surrender of their pre-transformation characters. It made me wonder

if the rhinoceros-identities that these people assumed were, rather than simplified versions of the

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selves they had already presented us with, exaggerated versions of those selves as amplified by

their bestial transformation(s).

Greece’s version of Punch and Judy is a shadow-puppet character called Καρακγιόζης

who resembles a version of the Pulcinella character of the Commedia Dell’Arte tradition. Much

like Ionesco’s characters, these shadow-puppets are often endowed with a singularly defining

characteristic that is both their downfall and their salvation. Many of these plays are improvised

loosely around a set plot structure where the characters behave according to their archetype to

play out the story’s end. Ionesco’s use of stock characters allowed me to change aspects of their

scenario to contrive of a new set structure to drop the archetypes into. These flexible storylines

created using established archetypes were an encouraging model for my own endeavor with

Rhinoceros. These stories feel built on a “what if…” premise, whereas the characters who have

been built on their singular, intrinsic qualities, react predictably in given circumstances.

Ionesco privileges the author’s authority on the text as incontestable and above the

critic’s commentary on the work, asserting that “the critic should be the pupil of the work,”

elucidating rather than challenging the author’s intentions with the piece of writing. Ionesco

characterizes “the bad critic…[as] the arrogant one, who wants to foist himself upon the work,

and who assumes a superior attitude towards it.” (Wellwarth, 35) Given Ionesco’s attitudes

toward criticism, where the interpretation of a work must defer to the author’s intention, I am not

sure that he would have approved of my approach to Rhinoceros or appreciated the deviation and

cuts. That said, given the central themes of Rhinoceros, it is evident that Ionesco encouraged

curiosity, critical thought, and intellectual honesty over blind concession to an established idea.

Furthermore, Ionesco considers the play to be a self-contained unit, “a construction of the

imagination which should…stand entirely in its own right,” unlike, as per some of his examples,

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“a novel written in dialogue…a sermon, a lesson, a speech, or an ode.” (37) These rigid criteria

for what a play is discounts and discredits so much of what a play can be. These assertions of a

play’s insularity seem to dismiss the audience’s prior knowledge coming into a theatre and their

innate ability to draw connections and make leaps beyond what is shown them. Ionesco

compares a play’s structure to the architecture of a building, “its intended use matters little, is

irrelevant, neither subtracts nor adds anything…The essential characteristic of a building is

simply that it is something built.” George E. Wellwarth takes issue with this assertion in his

essay “Beyond Realism,” on the grounds that “for everyone else the function of a building…is

obviously the principle area of interest,” (37) noting that the only people concerned with the

nuance of the construction of a building would be students of architecture. As a director

considering this analogy, repurposing the play to fit another context would be like staging an

auction in a church; if the building is simply something built, as Ionesco suggests, then the

intended purpose of the building is of no consequence to the occupant or passing observer and

can be repurposed without limitations. The assertion that a building is merely a structure is

intended to reflect the notion that “A temple…could be used as a Christian church, a barracks, a

garage, a hospital, an insane asylum or a hall for political meetings, but no matter what its

current or former function, the consciousness of that function will have an effect on the visitor.”

(38) This ostensibly supports my adaptation as my intent was neither to efface Ionesco’s text in

lieu of the new narrative, nor to undermine the story or usurp Ionesco of his authorship of the

text; rather it was an attempt to divorce the preconceptions that have historically been imprinted

on the story and determine whether or not the structure of the play could house a new ideological

purpose, albeit one so unorthodox.

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(Re)Defining Absurdism

There has been contention with regard to the definition of Absurdist Theatre. The plays

of this theatre explore the “sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human

condition.” (Esslin, 23-24) This certainly seems like a relevant definition for a more faithful

interpretation of this play, but for my purposes, I needed to revisit this definition and define for

myself whether or not the absurdity was serving the storytelling and in what way.

Martin Esslin’s coined the term ‘Absurdism’ in his seminal text on the genre, The

Theatre of the Absurd, and defines the term by a passage from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus:

A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a

universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an

irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he

lacks the hope of a promised land to come. The divorce between man and his life, the

actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. (Esslin, 23)

Existentialism, the way I understand it, is a philosophy defined by an individual’s ability

to exercise free will, and as such, take responsibility for their own lives. This necessarily means

that humans have agency over their actions and are accountable to their choices, consciously or

unconsciously, which complicates the traditional reading of the play as a tract against

conformism as that too, is inherently still a choice. Given this definition of absurdity, I would

posit that what makes anything absurd is a lack of understanding and an inability to adapt to that

“familiar world.” With Bérenger, his fixation on their transformation prevents him from

achieving a deeper understanding, which makes him feel alienated and thus informs his response.

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It seems that we are meant to sympathize with Bérenger—imagine ourselves in a world

populated by rhinoceroses who are unable to communicate and imposing in stature—and feel

empowered by his resistance at the end with his unfounded promise that he is “not capitulating.”

(Rhinoceros, 131) I believe that human beings find meaning and strength in community, and

Bérenger’s choice to ostracize himself from a community he does not understand speaks more to

his inability to communicate than it does with the rhinoceroses’, and therein lies the tragedy.

Martin Esslin quotes Ionesco as defining Absurdism as “that which is devoid of

purpose…Cut off from his religion, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his

actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” (Esslin, 23) This detachment feels more evident in

Bérenger than it does in the townspeople despite their transformation from human to beast.

Jean’s criticism of Bérenger in the play is that he has no direction in life—which I chose to

represent in the opening sequence by having Bérenger reliant exclusively on a map for direction,

mirrored by his exclusive reliance on the TV for information—that he drinks too much and has

nothing beyond that to live for. By the end of the play, Bérenger has sequestered himself in his

apartment, separated from the rest of the world to avoid a confrontation with an issue he does not

agree with and knows virtually nothing about.

It is commonly accepted that Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros as a commentary on the rise of

Fascism in Romania’s Iron Guard in 1938 and the gradual and widespread support for the

movement, specifically among intellectuals, or those he deems “demi-intellectuals.” (Radio-

Canada, 1961) His criticism is not that people should avoid rallying behind a cause lest they be

seen as conformists: it is that popular opinion can be corrosive to reason and dangerous when

adopted and espoused without critical thought.

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Michael Y. Bennett contests that texts typically categorized as absurdist “revolt against

existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life meaningful.”

(Reassessing 2) Bennett suggests we reimagine texts traditionally pigeonholed as absurdist as

‘parabolic’. Bennett postulates that the playwrights categorized in the Absurdist genre are, rather

than commenting on the absurdity of the human condition, exploring “the consequences and our

resulting actions [in response to] our absurd situation.” Consider then that it is not the

rhinoceroses that make Bérenger’s world absurd, but it is rather the absurd condition of that

world that elicits the reaction of their transformations. If Bérenger and the rhinoceroses both live

in an absurd world, each is choosing the way in which they react, adapt, and carry on inside of it.

Absurdism then is not grounded in the feeling of hopelessness in the face of a topsy-turvy,

carnivalesque world, but rather in the lengths people must go in order to live in it.

Reading this play as a parable as Michael Y. Bennett suggests means reading Bérenger—

the protagonist of the play and the only character to remain human by the end—as a cautionary

tale. If the play is a tract against conformism, is it then suggesting that the alternative is to be

more like Bérenger? And how does that reading of the text explain the first rhinoceroses? Why

did they transform, and to what standard were they conforming? These were the kinds of

questions I found myself asking and the thought of Bérenger as a model for living was absurd.

Initially, I thought of the rhinoceros passing through in Act One as soldiers, but this was because

of my bias toward a historical reading of the play. Working backwards from there, a populace

slowly rallying—either for or against something—felt more empowering than it did ominous,

and I wondered if our production could teach a new lesson through this iconic parable:

complacency is the antithesis to progress, and those moving forward will always seem to be

moving in the wrong direction to the person has not chosen a direction.

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Bennett agrees with Esslin that “the words and actions of the plays of the Theatre of the

Absurd are many times contradictory,” (22) before defining what he means by “parabolic

drama.” Citing Paul Ricoeur, Bennett asserts that “the plot first orients the audience and then

disorients it [whereas] The job of reorientation…is left up to the audience,” (22) to consider their

place in it and extrapolate the real-world equivalents of the images and ideas presented. While

Bennett’s reframing of the absurd challenges the traditional conception of it, I find it somewhat

incomplete given the biblical connotations of the word ‘parable’ and would offer that the didactic

message of the play—specifically looking at Rhinoceros rather than the entire canon of

Absurdist plays—is more in line with Aesop’s fables, wherein innate human qualities are

reflected through anthropomorphized animals as a means of teaching particular values through a

more detached approach.

Bennett quotes Emmanuel Jaquart describing Rhinoceros as “a parable of sorts

condemning all totalitarian regimes,” (91) and what did not resonate with me about this reading

of the text was the fact that totalitarian regimes typically have a charismatic figurehead, whereas

the rhinoceroses seemed more anarchic, again, with no singular authoritarian figure dictating

their rampages. If Rhinoceros is indeed a parable, it warrants a consideration as to what the

moral is intended to be, and Bérenger just does not represent the kind of morally forthright

archetype that I would feel comfortable espousing as exemplary. His reaction to what he deems

to be wrong is seclusion and prejudice and fear. Whereas if we consider the rhinoceroses as a

representation of a more progressive ideology, Bérenger chooses complacency. Bérenger’s

response to the absurdity of his world is alcoholism, whereas the rhinoceroses, plain and simple,

respond by creating a community and, in our production, instigating a revolt for change.

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Challenging the Accepted Interpretation of the Text

Nancy Lane, author of Understanding Eugène Ionesco, succinctly summarizes the

“widely noted” context of Rhinoceros as reflecting “Ionesco’s own bewilderment and horror at

seeing nearly all of his colleagues and compatriots in Bucharest succumb to fascism between

1934 and 1938,” wherein the rhinoceroses were meant to be “a symbol for the fascist Iron

Guards whose rise to power in Romania paralleled the rise of Nazism in Germany.” (Lane, 112)

When I refer to conventional or accepted interpretations of the play, this is the context that I am

referring to, which is itself referring to an anecdote (quoted by Lane) featuring Ionesco’s

description of a conversation with a friend who had capitulated where he describes the

transformation before his eyes and asserts that “He had become a rhinoceros.”

When choosing translations, I opted for Derek Prouse’s text. His was the first English

translation from the original French, and therefore bears a unique proximity to Ionesco’s

original. I wanted to adapt the text with all its original flaws and connotations, despite what is

necessarily lost in translation. I did not want a text that had already been swept for uncouth

language, or tidied for the purposes of preserving a modern audience’s sensibilities; I wanted to

decide what needed to be revised, rephrased, or cut, and start from a version of the text that most

resembled the original. This was important to me because, despite the irreverent and heavy cuts I

made to the script, I wanted to be adapting Ionesco’s play, not someone else’s updated or

watered-down version of it.

Rhinoceros premiered in Düsseldorf in January 1959, and “the German audience instantly

recognized the arguments used by the characters who feel they must follow the trend as those

they themselves had heard, or used, at a time when people in Germany could not resist the lure of

Hitler.” (Esslin, 182) Sixty years after its premier, our political climate is, arguably, not much

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different. Slogans are still as potent as ever as is evident in the vitriolic phrase “Make America

Great Again,” and the emergent white supremacist groups under the moniker of ‘alt-right’ that

have used it to find a validation for their racist, xenophobic, ultra-nationalistic rhetoric. The

difference this time is that responses are met head on. For example, alt-right provocateur,

Richard Spencer, is punched in the face by a masked protester during an interview held in the

midst of what appears to be a demonstration, and the viral video of this assault sparks a

controversy over whether free-speech ought to allow hate-speech and whether physical violence

was justified with an insurgent movement behind the phrase ‘Punch A Nazi in the Face.’ I note

this because behind any cause there are slogans, and whether they are bigoted or inclusive, they

must necessarily be simplified as it seems to be the easiest way to mobilize likeminded people

under a position. The simplicity of a slogan and the nuance of the ideology that the slogan stands

for can be extrapolated in a manifesto or a speech, but the tagline is no less valid than the

ideology: it is simply a method of supporting the greater message and galvanizing a larger

audience’s attention. This effective approach to the concise dissemination of an idea is found in

protest phrases: short, repeatable affirmations that can be chanted at demonstrations to

communicate mass feelings of dissatisfaction for something or support for something else. To

this end, it would not be practical to march in the streets with the Canadian Charter of Rights and

Freedoms printed on a series of banners; but a concise message expressing feelings toward a

particular injustice is a much more feasible and effective method of protest. Ionesco’s criticism

was that the messages behind the slogans had become diluted and more resembled catch phrases

than anything their corresponding ideological mandate, and adherence becomes automatic rather

than critically considered. I agree with Ionesco insofar as slogans alone are not adequately

nuanced to express the depth of a complete idea, and the inevitable lure is parroting, but this

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oversimplification has been, for many social movements, a powerful method of garnering

support and raising awareness for the cause, i.e., ‘Black Lives Matter’. I believe that, to an

extent, it is the inaccessibility of professional and academic language and the accessibility of

media that tempts the average person away from attaining a deeper level of understanding.

The title of the play in the original French is Rhinocéros, despite a publishing error in its

initial release that saw it titled Le Rhinocéros. This may seem like a trivial oversight and a

negligible difference, but the addition of the definite article to the singular noun dilutes the sense

of the plurality of the rhinoceroses and implies the topic of the play is one specific rhinoceros, or

rhinoceroses as a species. In the case of its singular usage, the titular ‘rhinoceros’ might be

interpreted as Bérenger himself, as by the end of the play, he is the only one left of his kind,

perhaps suggesting a metaphoric transformation in contrast to the literal ones. It is clear that

Ionesco did not intend the title to be read this way, but the fact is, Bérenger undergoes a

transformation of his own, and as the play’s protagonist, his transformation is at the core of the

play as he is only character not to transform physically, and therefore the one character that the

audience is able to follow until the end.

What I wanted to communicate with my rendition of Rhinoceros was the idea that

ignorance on a subject can lead to simplification, and thorough, nuanced understanding of a

complicated idea cannot be attained through a simple understanding. I wanted to challenge the

idea that the rhinoceroses are undesirable simply because of the fact that they are different, and

to depict Bérenger’s knee-jerk emotional response toward them as irrational and reactionary.

This is not say that I consider Ionesco’s rhinoceroses to be misunderstood, or that I sympathize

in any way with fascist ideologies, but rather that generalizations lead to prejudices which are

harmful when they are used to inform an overarching opinion.

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Ionesco’s Bérenger: Everyman, or Proxy?

The character of Bérenger appears in four of Ionesco’s plays: The Killer (1958,)

Rhinoceros (1959,) Exit the King (1962,) and A Stroll in the Air (1963.) Using the Bérenger in

Rhinoceros as a baseline, I found similarities in character(s) that each Bérenger shares.

Ionesco seems to employ Bérenger as a kind of everyman, always portrayed as being

gradually overtaken by the central symbolism of the play. Esslin posits that “they are not

necessarily the same person; or it may be that the Bérenger of Rhinoceros is a younger Bérenger,

in an earlier phase of his career.” (Esslin, 181) Whether they are the same person or not, if we

think of absurdist theatre as parabolic, we must then consider the allegorical representations of

the characters and the function they serve in the texts. If we consider Bérenger as a device, and

analyze that character’s function in the play(s) in relation to the overall action, there are

similarities in each of the texts that he appears in with regard to what he is meant to symbolize,

and each Bérenger functions as a kind of stand-in for the average uneducated man and is always

portrayed as, or expresses himself to be, a victim.

In Exit the King the force that Bérenger is gradually overtaken by is his own mortality.

The play introduces us to King Bérenger The First, who, we are informed near the beginning of

the play, is dying. Bérenger’s kingdom is in shambles, he speaks and is spoken about as if he has

been alive for centuries, and everyone in the court is coming to grips with his death. The play

ends with Marguerite, his first wife, preparing him for what we are meant to interpret to be his

death. Rather than a proliferation of things onstage, it seems to be a gradual diminishing, with

the only props left at the end of the play being the king’s scepter and crown.

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In The Killer, Bérenger is described in the list of characters as “an average, middle-aged

citizen.” (Killer, 16) The play begins by introducing us to an idealized district of the city that

Bérenger has “tried consciously or unconsciously to find the way” to, and only now stumbles

upon it by accident. Depicted on a bare stage through the lighting alone, the district is referred to

as the ‘radiant city’, and the play opens with the city’s architect giving Bérenger a tour. This city

is perfect and harmonious in every possible way, with the exception of a killer that has eluded

police and kills his victims by luring them with a photo of the colonel and drowning them in a

pool. Bérenger is initially excited by the prospect of living in this community, and expresses a

belief that in moving to this district his life would improved, telling the architect of the turmoil

and grief he faces day to day. Midway through the scene, the architect’s assistant, a blonde

woman named Dany appears and gives her resignation, while Bérenger, having just met her,

proposes marriage. He henceforth refers to this woman as his fiancée and even though she does

not acknowledge his proposal, he is devastated when she becomes a victim of the killer too. In

Act Two, his friend Édouard, resembling the character of Jean in Rhinoceros, tries to encourage

Bérenger to be more level-headed, and it is revealed that Édouard’s briefcase contains photos of

the colonel and he becomes a suspect. The play culminates in a confrontation between Bérenger

and the killer, described as being “very small and puny, ill-shaven, with a torn hat on his head

and a shabby old gabardine…[with] only one eye…and a set expression on his still face.” (Killer,

97) Ionesco offers productions an alternative in that “possibly there is no killer at all [and]

Bérenger could be talking to himself.” (98) During a twelve-page exchange, the killer responds

to Bérenger’s appeals by chuckling and occasionally shrugging. By the end, the killer has drawn

a knife, and Bérenger, having used a variety of tactics to get him to answer his questions and

elucidate his motives for killing random people, draws two pistols, and for a moment it seems to

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be a stand off, until Bérenger surrenders and accepts his fate, conceding that “there’s nothing we

can do.” (109) In both plays, Bérenger pins his hopes of happiness on his female romantic

interest who, beyond possessing the superficial qualities of being beautiful and blonde, are both

women [similarly named, ‘Dany’ and ‘Daisy’] and assistants to male authority figures, and

whom Bérenger himself knows little to nothing about.

A Stroll In the Air depicts a different version of Bérenger. In the list of characters,

Bérenger is referred to as “the Heavenly Hiker,” and by the end of the play, develops the ability

to fly. This play supports my theory of Bérenger being a recurring character and even explains

the deviations from one version of Bérenger to the next. Ionesco uses dreams in this play, and

makes explicit the existence of multiple universes in his writing with the introduction of the

‘Anti-World’. Bérenger explains to his young daughter that “There’s not just one Anti-World.

There are several universes, and they’re all interlocking,” (A Stroll in the Air, 27) and that

furthermore, “These worlds interlink and interlock, without touching one another, for they can all

co-exist in the same space.” (28) The play seems, on the one hand, to be about retaining a

childlike wonder and imagination into adulthood despite the idea that we must sacrifice that

potential in exchange for the façade of sophistication. But it seems also, in part, to be about

manifesting your reality and actively impacting and designing the world you want to live in

through action. It is about initiative, the power of the human being, and in a world where

“machines are taking over the functions of men,” (52) it is man’s job to manifest his own vision

of the world. Unlike the other plays, this is not Bérenger’s story. It centers more on his wife,

Josephine, and her fears and anxieties taking real form in nightmares, and Marthe, their daughter,

who is at risk of losing her own childlike wonder herself. Marthe warned her mother that the

apparitions that approached her, i.e., the seven-foot-tall judge, John Bull, the giant white man,

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the hangman, etc., could not hurt her. “It’s a vision…a nightmare. It’s not real. It’s only real if

you believe in it…if you think it is…if you want it to be.” (64)

Bérenger may be a character constructed to afford Ionesco the distance to indirectly write

about his own experience of the world. In his short play, Improvisation, or the Shepherd’s

Chameleon, Ionesco writes himself as a character, showing he is apt to write from his own

perspective and insert himself into his fictions. At the beginning of A Stroll in the Air, Bérenger

is approached by a journalist hoping for an interview, identifying Bérenger as a playwright; they

go toe-to-toe for four pages: Bérenger on the frivolity of literature and literary celebrity, and the

journalist adamant to know “when shall we see in the great theatres of the world one of your new

masterpieces?” (8) Later in the play, a Little Girl expresses the desire to be a prima donna when

she grows up, demonstrating a “series of mechanical trills, just like a little mechanical

nightingale” (16) and is shortly thereafter revealed to be bald after a Little Boy steals her wig.

The Bérenger family reacts to this and the girl’s mother responds by assuring them that “[her]

little girl is the little bald prima donna,” (17) and no one is surprised by this fact. The seven-foot-

tall judge that appears onstage to pass judgment on Josephine is compared in the stage directions

to “the dead body…at the end of AMEDEE OR HOW TO GET RID OF IT”, (63) another of

Ionesco’s plays. These intertextual references indicate that Ionesco thought of his fictional

worlds as coinciding. All four Bérenger(s) may co-exist in the multiple universes made manifest

in Ionesco’s body of work without necessarily ever meeting, making each of them susceptible to

their own experiences, but they are, inherently, the same archetype.

A comparative analysis of these four plays seems to suggest that, regardless of whether or

not the three characters are the same person, ‘Bérenger’ is a construct representing the average

man. In A Stroll in the Air, the Journalist reacts to Bérenger’s giddiness by proclaiming that

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“Modern man is quite unbalanced. As you can see in behaviour like this.” (44) I would go so far

as to say that Bérenger is written as an alias for Ionesco in his fictional theatrical oeuvre. In each

case, the character is gradually outnumbered or overpowered, and ultimately defeated, by an

intractable force. This force tends to be an allegorical representation of a more abstract issue

(i.e., mortality, totalitarianism, etc.) So if the antagonistic presence in these Bérenger plays is

allegorical, it seems safe to interpret Bérenger as an everyman representing to some extent all of

mankind, or perhaps more accurately Ionesco’s relationship with mankind. Most interpretations

of Rhinoceros are aligned in the claim that it is a “tract against conformism” (Esslin, 183) or a

“parable…on the sacred individuality of man,” (Bennett, Reassessing 89) but Bérenger’s

retention of his individuality and resistance to the mob mentality says more about his cowardice

and prejudice than his strength of will. My approach to the character of Bérenger was that he can

be whatever the play requires him to be, but he will always represent an outsider. If Bérenger is a

construct for Ionesco to reflect his own anxieties about the world, then Bérenger can also be a

construct for my own reconciliation of my lack of social activism and initiative in a world

riddled with problems.

What I have always found interesting about Rhinoceros is the general consensus for

readers and most audience members that it is Bérenger’s right to resist and that the

transformations are a blight on the town and a schism in their identity. Bérenger’s transformation

through the play rather than the populace’s has always seemed to me the one to follow. Bérenger

opens the play as a drunkard, and by the end “defends his desire to remain human with the same

recourse to instinctive feelings that he condemns in the rhinos.” (Esslin, 183) He becomes an

extremist of sorts, spouting his own platitudes: “Man is superior to the rhinoceros,” (Rhinoceros,

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114) and “We must attack the evil at its roots.” (99) These statements come from a place of fear

and prejudice, without a complete understanding of what the rhinoceroses want or represent.

At the end of A Stroll in the Air, Bérenger returns to the ground with divine knowledge

and after all present parties beg him to share with them what he saw, Bérenger reveals to them a

disturbing description of the end times. The people react by calling him ‘vulgar,’ and ‘indecent,’

criticizing his horrific vision as second-rate, and rejecting it, refusing to believe it because it is

not palatable. Paralleling the beginning of the play—Bérenger’s encounter with the journalist

inquiring about his next published work—the ending of the play reveals his oneiric vision of a

biblical apocalypse which is dismissed as poorly written literature, with all present chiming in

with their criticisms before storming off and missing his vision of hell on earth begin to manifest

itself in front of his wife and young child. As mentioned earlier, Ionesco had a notoriously

contentious relationship with critics, and in this play, Bérenger once again seems to be a stand-in

for Ionesco himself. In A Stroll in the Air, Bérenger’s prophetic message to the town and their

disbelief at this message—like the tragic seer Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon—seems to

reflect Ionesco’s own frustrations with the critical reception of his work and pervading popular

literature through Bérenger and this surreal play.

One common convention in all of these Bérenger plays, is that it is often Bérenger against

a group or insurmountable force to whom he is seen as the antithesis, presented as the one

rational person in the midst of a morally reprehensible, aloof, or simply ignorant cross-section of

humanity. If these plays are all utilizing the same Bérenger, it is possible that at some point after

the end of the play, the world returns to normal and the rhinoceroses turn back into humans, and

the transformation was the empowerment they needed to confront a force much greater than

themselves, and still Bérenger has not changed.

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Peripheral Theatre and Woyzeck

Peripheral Theatre began as a placeholder title for a company that does not yet exist. It

was a moniker under which I hoped to produce my original written work, but has since evolved

into an approach to staging, composition, and design aesthetic, and has come to inform many of

my directorial choices over the last two years.

The way that I currently understand peripheral theatre as a concept is as a broad approach

to directing the audiences’ attention and diverting, or more generally manipulating, their focus.

As the name suggests, I am interested in not only the focal point, but also what exists outside of

it. This can manifest in an immersive theatre setting, or it can be implemented on a more

traditional proscenium stage. Though the name borrows from optical terminology, there is a full

sensory consideration that underpins the peripheral theatre approach, namely in the senses that

are often neglected in theatrical settings, i.e., olfactory, taste, and tactile senses. Peripheral

theatre defies a firmly delineated structure or paradigm as of yet, but has had the space to

develop and evolve over the last two years into a much more cohesive idea. It is important to

note that I consider this concept to be in its infancy with regard to how it will hopefully develop

over the course of my career and how it will manifest with different directorial projects.

For my pre-thesis production I directed Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: a fragmented text that

tells the story of a low-ranking soldier who is subjected to medical experimentation and becomes

an extension of the system that oppresses and bullies him until he hits a breaking point. With this

production I experimented with displacing the perceived source of sound from the perception of

where we are hearing the sound, i.e., the Drum Major uses a bottle to hit Woyzeck in the teeth,

and the resultant ‘ting’ emanated from the percussionist’s set up on a different part of the stage. I

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used this effect multiple times throughout the production, and employed the use of the

percussionist in this way to disorient the audience and to translate in their viewing of the scene,

an experiential feel of Woyzeck’s predicament. I wanted to translate the character’s paranoia for

the audience in a way that made them second guess their own senses.

Likewise, in directing Rhinoceros, we used a wide seating configuration so that the

audience, inundated with visual stimuli, would have a constant peripheral engagement to make

the stage seem busier than it was. This was primarily effective with scenes requiring the full

ensemble, for example, the opening sequence introducing the audience to the town square, and

the rioting scene at the end. For the majority of the other scenes, I made staging decisions that

kept the active characters in the same visual frame and focally connected, but would occasionally

subvert this by introducing a new visual stimulus. One example of this was the introduction of

the metamorphosed characters into their respective spotlights, toting protest signs, whom

Bérenger watches via the television in Act Three. Similarly, I used brief tableaus to coordinate

the overlapping dialogue between the Old Gentleman and the Logician, and Bérenger and Jean in

Act One as a way of directing the audience’s gaze. Because movement draws the eye and

refocuses our attention, I was strategic to choreograph the moments coming out of each tableau

in conjunction with the actors’ spoken text.

Moving forward as a director, I plan to integrate research on the ways in which our

attention and focus can be manipulated into my practice. As it stands, I have no formal tutelage

in the field of cognitive psychology, but during my time as a graduate student at the University

of Calgary’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, I have developed a respect for the

indispensable relationship between arts and science. What began as an aesthetic preference soon

became a professional curiosity which I will continue to explore beyond my graduate studies.

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Understanding Greece’s Economic Crisis

Sine 2010, Greece has received approximately 326 billion Euros in bail outs from the

IMF (International Monetary Fund) in an attempt to stabilize their economy, and each bailout has

been accompanied by mandatory austerity measures that have resulted in increased taxes, cuts to

public spending, cuts to salaries and pensions, and has contributed to staggering unemployment,

notably in the country’s youth which was at one point as high as sixty-percent.

Greece was accepted into the Eurozone in 2001 “on the basis of figures that showed its

budget deficit to be much lower than it really was,” (BBC News) effectively adopting the Euro

as its currency. By 2009, Greece’s newly elected socialist government, PASOK, under leader

George Papandreou, announced that Greece’s national deficit was worse than previous

governments had reported. With each bailout package, there came a fresh wave of protests,

notably in 2010 and 2012, some escalating into full-blown riots involving citizens engaging with

police, as well nationwide strikes. In 2014, Greece elected an anti-austerity coalition party,

Syriza, led by Alexis Tsipras, who as part of his campaign rejected more bailout packages and

the corresponding austerity measures. Tsipras held a referendum in July of 2015, asking the

Greek people to vote on whether to accept new bailouts and people voted overwhelmingly

against it. Despite this vote, Greece accepted a third bailout.

Understanding the debt crisis was paramount to understanding the impetus for the

protests. While I recognize this is a simplistic summation, what became a pivotal for me in

adapting this project was my interest the united response of the protesters. The key for me was

capturing the spirit of the shared dissent that I had observed in short video clips and

documentaries. Because I was repurposing an existing text and I was not writing anything

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original, the words were a constant in our production. Any parallels or comparisons needed to be

made using the existing script, so the commentary was limited in its specificity with regard to

what I could say with the piece, but then, so was Ionesco’s original text with regard to Fascism.

The rhinoceroses are never outright defined, and though the script is full of hints, and it is widely

accepted as the intent of the play, it is never made explicit. Likewise, our production was not

intended to be an informative presentation or lecture on the historical circumstances—although

one of my goals with the show was to inspire post-show curiosity and conversation—but rather it

was an exploration of the types of people affected and their response using the crisis as a

premise. I am not an authority on the Greek economic crisis, nor was it critical that I became one

for the purposes of directing this show, but I can say that as a result, I am much more informed

on the issue even if there are still some gaps in my overall understanding.

On Metamorphosis and Allegory

As I mentioned earlier, I often derive inspiration from other artists working in other

mediums, and these can sometimes come from unlikely sources. Once Rhinoceros was chosen as

my thesis show, I made myself a reading list that was not limited to academic texts, but included

relevant works of fiction. I chose George Orwell’s Animal Farm for its anthropomorphic,

allegorical commentary on communism and the aftermath of a revolution, in addition to

revisiting some of Aesop’s fables and Ovid’s Metamorphoses for both the allegory and the

transformation metaphor, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Trial primarily because I saw a

parallel between the protagonists in the three pieces—Gregor Samsa, Josef K., and Bérenger—as

traditionally being perceived as outsiders in their absurd, Kafkaesque worlds.

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From each of these works I pulled elements that resonated with what I was attempting

with Rhinoceros, and sometimes the most influential part was a single line, or simply the tone the

author took in the writing; whereas with others, specifically Kafka’s The Trial, I found myself

reading the character of Josef K. in the same light as I had been reading Bérenger, and finding

that some of my observations were applicable. As I was reading The Trial, I could not help

reading Josef K. as an entitled and self-centered protagonist. While the novel is written in third

person, I got the sense that Josef K. was insulted by the very idea of an accusation against him

and rejected the idea as an impossibility, which informs the reader’s perception of the unfairness

of the charge and the bureaucratic system he is forced to navigate, and naturally, this world

would be perceived as nightmarish and infuriating. But the brilliance of Kafka’s writing made

me second guess the reliability of the narrator and speculate, in the same way I found myself

buying into the possibility of the rhinoceroses’ singing, if perhaps he had committed a crime.

With Rhinoceros, I was interested in manifesting the Kafkaesque through Bérenger’s reactions to

a world that he perceives to be absurd in an attempt to put into question his reliability as a

narrator and elicit in the audience the same kind of doubt and distrust that I felt while reading

Kafka’s Josef K.

Orwell’s Animal Farm resonated with the production in a different way. This novel

presents us with a world where livestock overthrow humans on a farm and take it over for

themselves, vowing to correct the injustices of their former oppressors and build the farm on a

different ideal that privileges animals and equality. The line that resonated with me was in the

first chapter, and foreshadowed the downfall of the farm and linked it to the idea that power

corrupts even those with the greatest of intentions. Major, a veteran pig on the farm, envisions a

glorious future for the animals on the farm if they are able to unify, proposing that “all the evils

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of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings,” (Orwell, 5) but warns that “…in

fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him.” (6) This resonated with the message

at the end of the play, specifically the themes in the song used to underscore the curtain call and

the idea of shifting power structures.

Because this play centers on humans transforming into rhinoceroses, I thought it prudent

to research the animal itself. After some preliminary research, something about the vilification of

the rhinoceros and the rhinoceros as a symbol for Fascism felt problematic to me. March 2018

marked the death of the last male northern white rhinoceros, leaving the fate of the species in

crisis. This piqued my interest to the animal itself and led me to research. When directing a play

that features a particular animal as its central metaphor and namesake, it felt obvious to research

the animal. Rhinoceroses are vegetarians. Their only predator in nature is human beings, who

hunt them not for their meat the way we do other animals, but poached for its keratin horn,

alleged to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties.

The rhinoceros is an imposing, ancient looking creature, but on the whole with a

defensive and non-aggressive temperament. Rhinoceroses have poor eye sight and have been

known to attack when they feel threatened. Consider the habitat of the rhinoceros: predominantly

grasslands, savannas, and swamps. The urban setting is as threatening of an environment as I can

imagine for an animal with no predators and that lives in relative solitude. I found myself

wondering—despite the absurdity of the premise—how the rhinoceroses had found themselves

in a town square. One rationale I came up with—ignoring for a moment that I do not need to

justify this phenomenon, and that the play is not a play about animal conservation—is that

humans have expanded, as humans are wont to do, into the animals’ territory and colonized (but

of course this did not work with a French city, given that rhinoceroses are native to Africa and

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Asia, and was highly unlikely they would find themselves in central Greece.) I remembered that

the rhinoceroses are people that have been transformed, which took me to literature and the rich

history of humans writing about being metamorphosed into animals. I needed look no further

than the Greeks, whose mythology is rife with transformation for poetic justice, for protection,

and for, among other reasons, empowerment.

By the end of the play, the entire town has become rhinoceroses, but they are not

charging people, only causing property damage and adapting to their environment. Dudard

claims to have made it to Bérenger’s apartment just fine, despite walking past many on the street,

stating clearly and calmly that “They do not attack you. If you leave them alone, they just ignore

you.” (97) This passivity toward people with an interest more in destroying or defacing public

property and infrastructure is reminiscent to the protest and riot videos that I watched from

demonstrations in Greece. Working as co-writer on Christine Brubaker’s Henry G20 project

opened my eyes to the prevalence and culture of protesting and had me digging into the nuance

and history. Some of this research involved looking at the Black Bloc protest movement and

specifically the disruptive and often destructive tactics. One aspect of this research that struck me

was how these groups have been conflated with ordinary civilian demonstrations, which felt

connected to Jean’s more radical and vehement transformation, and even the Yellow Vest protest

activity happening more recently in France. The ferocity and passivity of a rhinoceros seem like

apt qualities to empower a group of protesters, and it had me thinking that this transformation

might serve to bolster or emphasize the qualities that protesters already exhibit.

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CHAPTER THREE: (RE)VISIONS

A director must develop a healthy working relationship with the living and present

collaborators involved in the project. A playwright who is no longer living in this respect is

present and active insofar as the text that survived them. In this chapter I will outline the textual

revisions that were necessary to realize my vision for the play. Setting the play in Greece

required extensive revisions, namely cuts to lines in the script, and reimagining the action as

different than what Ionesco provides in the stage directions. Achieving such a radical adaptation

of the script necessitated a radical rethinking of each of the component parts of the play and

matching them with a new correlate for a new circumstance.

The καληµέρα [which translates to ‘good morning/afternoon’ in English] opening

sequence at the top of the show was inspired by the opening numbers from popular Broadway

musicals such as Guys and Dolls’ “Runyonland”, Cabaret’s “Wilkommen”, The Book of

Mormon’s “Hello”, and Beauty and Beast’s “Belle”. These scenes serve to set the tone at the

beginning of the show, introduce the audience to the characters and the style, and most

importantly help to transition them into the world of the play. A piece of advice that my

supervisor, Professor Christine Brubaker, gave me early on that stuck with me was: “the first

minute of the show teaches the audience how to watch the rest of it.”

Because of the contextual shift, I wanted to introduce the rhinoceroses to the audience

before their first appearance in the script to demystify their existence, and with their first action

onstage, to indicate to audience members that might be familiar with the play, that these

rhinoceroses are not Ionesco’s rhinoceroses. It was important to establish right from the

beginning that the play was set in Greece both through the music and the Greek graffiti.

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The opening sequence of the show was split into two sequences. The first sequence being

the introduction of the rhinoceroses—who in our production function as a silent Greek chorus—

defacing the storefronts in the middle of the night by the light of the streetlamps, and then fleeing

before the people of the town enter and begin their day. For this sequence, I chose the song

“Karakolia” by Villagers of Ioannina City because of how it integrates the Greek folk elements

with the heavier rock sound. The second sequence being the entrance of the townspeople with a

gradual lighting shift from night to day. For this sequence, I chose “Μαλλια Σγουρα,” a Greek

Partisan folk song by Πέτρος Πανδής released in 1974. It was important to me that we contrast

the styles of music to serve almost as a leitmotif to the respective groups from the beginning.

In this opening sequence, I wanted to establish the dissenting nature of the rhinoceroses

before introducing the peaceful coexistence of the town’s people, as well as depict Bérenger as

something of an outsider within this paradigm. Bérenger is the only character that does not say

καληµέρα as he passes through, in part because he is glued to his smart phone in what was

intended to look like someone following a Google Map route, but also because I did not want to

introduce him officially yet. Knowing what I know about Bérenger and Ionesco’s use of the

character, I think it would’ve been a stronger choice to lean into the idea of him being a

foreigner, and have him respond to the collective καληµέρα with ‘good morning’. The choice to

depict Bérenger as absorbed in his device, was intended to indicate his narrow focus and social

dissonance with the rest of the community. Daisy was the only other character whose attention

was completely engrossed and did not say καληµέρα, but as Daisy is the last to change before

Bérenger, it seemed appropriate. The difference between Bérenger and Daisy in this respect is

what they are engrossed with: Bérenger, staring at his smart phone, trying to find his bearings by

meandering directionless through the enclosed town square, navigating the world through his

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device; and Daisy, completely absorbed in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. During this opening

sequence, the only word spoken out other than καληµέρα, is γαµότο—a catch-all expletive that is

generally used to express dissatisfaction or frustration—spoken by the Grocer in reaction to the

graffiti on his storefront. Using Greek language allowed me to have a character onstage

ostensibly shout what loosely translates to ‘fuck,’ and be allowed that emphatic expression

without alienating the audience. This was important to me because as an older brother to younger

siblings, I wanted this show to be family-friendly and accessible. Incorporating Greek language

effectively grounded the piece in its setting, and in my experience, captured the tone of a town

square in Greece, as I find Greeks to be emphatic and expressive speakers.

One prop I considered, but ultimately chose not to incorporate that would have been

reflective of the Greek setting, in particular as a pass time for the older men, was a κοµβολόι, or

worry beads—a string of thick, wooden beads that old men are seen to fidget with and flip in

their hands—which would have been used by the character of the Old Gentleman. I made this

choice because it makes a distracting racket and would have added motion onstage that would’ve

pulled focus, and though it may have been an authentic addition to the character, the scenes with

the Old Gentleman were carefully directed with the audience’s focus in mind. Likewise, I chose

to have the Old Gentleman and the Logician playing chess, even though backgammon would

have been more culturally reflective, but as backgammon uses dice, I wanted to avoid using the

distracting the sound of rolling dice in such a delicate split-stage scene.

The Housewife’s cat was a symbolic prop that I felt could have been given more attention

and whose significance was perhaps unclear to the spectators. Because the death of the

Housewife’s cat becomes such an integral part of Act One following the rhinoceroses second

entrance in the script, I needed to assign it a new meaning so that it would not feel out of place in

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my production. I asked for a distinctive coloration to the cat’s fur in the shape of the symbol for

the Euro currency, which, though given the size of the cat and the coloration of the fur, was

unfortunately not made as clear to the audience as I would have liked. The moment the cat is

ripped apart was meant to look like a political cartoon: the two rhinoceroses in the foreground

fighting over the cat, which was meant to symbolize the Euro, and a crowd of people,

presumably the Greek public, standing at a distance looking on in shock and disapproval. One of

the most popular reactions to Greece’s debt crisis is that it is because Greek people are lazy, or

evade taxes, and bleed the government for pensions at thirty. Granted this is anecdotal and may

not reflect general feelings, it is the common sentiment that I hear expressed: that Greek people

had done this to themselves. Greece has had an issue with tax evasion, but I would contest that it

was a contributing factor, but not the root cause of the economic crisis. In the past, my reactions

to these assertions have been, for lack of contextual knowledge on the subject, silence; as

someone of Greek heritage living in Canada, I feel it was my responsibility to have educated

myself sooner and perhaps these feelings contributed to my interest in recontextualizing the play.

The addition of the Housewife and Grocer haggling over the bottle of wine, with the

Grocer lowering the price to as low as 5,00€ was an addition that was not in Ionesco’s text. In

retrospect, I should have requested a 2L plastic bottle for this exchange. Many people, especially

in small villages that produce their own wine, store it in clear plastic Coca Cola bottles, or

washed out olive oil tins, and this would have more accurately represented the small business

owner’s stock. This moment came about organically, and was meant to show the unstable nature

of sales in Greece. I have always known that bartering is common practice in the Greek

marketplace, but this summer it became evident to me that prices, especially in restaurants, are

wont to fluctuate depending on what language you spoke. By this, I literally mean that I had the

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experience in restaurants of noticing that the menu in English had different prices listed beside

the items than the menu in Greek. This did not seem like a standard practice specific to

restaurants, and perhaps going during high tourist season was a factor, but nonetheless, bartering

was an acceptable form of engaging with a sale. In tourist shops especially, we noticed

handmade items made from wood, or plaster-cast, and the prices for these items ranged, but the

cost of these items seemed to fluctuate from language to language. If my wife, an English

speaker, tried to negotiate a lower price, she would fail, but if I spoke to the shopkeeper in

Greek, the price was often reduced by a few Euro simply by my demonstrating my fluency with

the language.

Transitioning into the second scene, I took Bérenger’s final lines of the act and adapted

them to be an exchange with the waitress wherein he is settling the tab for the brandies but can

not afford to pay the bill. The waitress shouts “Μανα!”, which in Greek translates to mother, and

in that moment, the grocer’s wife rushes on with the bucket of soapy water and oversized sponge

she had previously used to try to scrub away the graffiti and hands them to Bérenger.

Act Two, Scene One (the office scene) was the first instance of explicitly stating the new

setting of the play with Mr. Papillon quoting the newspaper story, informing everyone present

that “Yesterday, just before lunch time, in [Syntagma] square…a cat was trampled to death by a

pachyderm.” (50) The original line had Mr. Papillon citing the incident as having happening “in

the church square of our town,” which felt like an appropriate moment for clarity, especially

given that Syntagma Square—the word itself meaning “Constitution”—has such a rich history

with regard to activism in Greece: the 1843 military uprising against King Otto wherein Greece

secured their constitution, as well as in more recent history being the site for mass protests

between 2010 and 2012.

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I sourced Greek newspaper headlines and cover pages. I tried to organize the content so

that it harkened to the July 2015 bailout referendum, where the Greek public voted against

accepting a new bailout package and the austerity measures that it would entail by 61%. Despite

this referendum, the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras—whose campaign opposed any more

bailouts and harsh austerity measures—agreed to the conditions and went ahead to accept the

package without the support of the public. Sourcing these newspapers was a task that I undertook

as I was the only one on the creative that spoke Greek, and I wanted there to be a through-line

there for Greek speakers in the audience to follow. I wanted to make sure that I represented the

catalyst for the protests in some form, and although I addressed this to some extent in my

director’s notes, it was important for me to show it in the production. The transformation, in my

mind, was the result of mounting frustration with their condition to the point that it had become

unbearable; in the same way that song in musical theatre is the result of an overwhelmingly

powerful emotion manifested through song because speaking is inadequate, likewise, I wanted

this transformation to be a breaking point. Protesting has proven ineffective in these

circumstances and their rage, disappointment, and feelings of betrayal were too tremendous that,

rather than bursting into song, they transformed into rhinoceroses to in order to stand a chance

against the forces they resist. This ties as well to dance being a heightened and stylized form of

movement, in a circumstance where simply moving was not sufficient to capture the spirit of the

movement.

In the same scene, I took the opportunity to use another Greek word, ‘Μαλακίες’, which

loosely translates to ‘bullshit’ to replace Ionesco’s—or more likely Prouse’s—Briticism

“Rubbish.” (Rhinoceros, 54) This once again allowed me to use Greek profanity and infuse a

45

little bit of the Greek language into the script. Additionally, this abrupt shift in language

recalibrates the audience’s ear and reorients them to the play’s setting.

Another major revision that anyone familiar with the original text will have noticed, is

the choice to cast a woman in the role of Botard. I address this decision more thoroughly in the

next chapter, specifically with regard to auditions, but the dramaturgical impetus for this casting

choice was to create a more balanced office dynamic so that the secretary and the woman who

runs in, terrified to the point of delirium, were not the only women in the scene. Botard engages

her co-workers in a dialogue about the rhinoceroses and is at first adamantly in denial of them

until she witnesses the rhinoceros for herself and changes her mind. This was foremost a

convenient double-casting decision, but was also informed by the actress’s undeniable stage

presence and experience which I will address more in the next chapter.

One of the key moments in this scene is the collapse of the staircase. It is seen as an act

of senseless aggression on the part of the recently metamorphosed rhinoceroses. The office, set

on a platform elevated four-feet above the stage, seems to represent the corporate and

bureaucratic systems that the people are revolting against: banks, government, etc., and

destruction of public, corporate property is a platform for Black Bloc groups and often the result

of mass rioting. Rather than depict the collapse as an act of violence, we chose to stage it as a

deconstruction, detaching the stair unit from the platform and using it to cause a cacophonous

noise and trap the newspapers in their office. In retrospect, thinking about the rhinoceroses as an

allegorical representation of the disenfranchised, and given the importance of the graffiti as a

voice for the voiceless, the newspapers that I sifted through to find headlines each took a

different position on the protests depending on their political bent. Some saw it as disgraceful,

while others championed the resistance. For the newspapers to be silenced, this would allow the

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protesters the opportunity to speak for themselves and manifest the writing on the walls into

unified action.

Likewise, the scene’s climax is Mr. Boeuf’s entrance and Mrs. Boeuf decision to leap out

of the window and ride away on her husband’s back. The challenge with this scene was finding

the rationale in the act and presenting it as something other than self-sacrificing. If what we have

established is that the world is dysfunctional or absurd, and becoming a rhinoceros is directly in

response to this absurdity, then Mr. Boeuf’s response, on top of becoming a rhinoceros, was to

rescue his wife. This, to me, read as a romantic gesture, so I leaned into that interpretation. Mr.

Boeuf entered waltzing rather poorly, a gesture that Mrs. Boeuf clearly appreciated and

responded to, and offered got down on one knee to offer Mrs. Boeuf a mask of her own, in an

image reminiscent of a marriage proposal. This gave Mrs. Boeuf the agency to decide whether or

not she wanted to accept the proposal, and furthermore allowed her to make the dangerous

decision to jump out of a window to follow through.

I chose to cast the rhinoceros dancers as the firemen, partly out of necessity, but also

because they are the embodiment of the movement, and it was important to me that they not be

seen as nefarious. As the play progresses, the rhinoceroses movement transitions from graceful

and stylized, to more bumbling and clown-like, to confident and resolute. This stage of physical

movement reflected the stage of the ideological movement as gaining momentum and support

but still seen as nonthreatening and frivolous. Representing the rhinoceroses in an altruistic light

humanizes them and helps us track their intentions, which are not to see people hurt, but to have

their message heard. Bringing the rhinoceros dancers back onstage to rescue those that they

stranded in the office was meant to recall the transition into this scene wherein they brought the

cat that they trampled back onstage with its stomach stitched up to indicate that they had

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corrected their mistake. Surely no amount of stitching would bring a disemboweled cat back to

life, but these are the liberties that I am able to take and the audience is willing to believe given

the highly animated style. This piece of staging fell in line with the light-hearted first half of the

show and successfully introduced the audience to the trickster nature of the rhinoceroses.

Moving into the second half of the play, I wanted to indicate a little more explicitly what

the rhinoceroses represented. In the first half we established that they were not violent, and

hinted through the posters that they hung during their first two passes in Act One that they were

activists of some kind, but it was not clear what they stood for. Placing them in Jean’s apartment

at the top of the Act, supervising while he handmade a protest sign— and paired with the

contemporary Greek hip hop and the audio of Georgios Papadopoulos—a Greek dictator from

the late 1960’s into the early 1970’s—coming from the TV, solidified them as the spirit of

protest and insurrection. I considered a more contemporary Greek leader, i.e., Alexis Tsipras, but

decided that I preferred the quality of the Papadopoulos clip, considering also that no one but the

Greeks would recognize his voice, and this would be evocative of and perhaps an homage to the

Polytechnic riot in Athens in 1973. Their presence in Jean’s apartment is not indicated in the

script because as individual characters in the script they do not exist. Jean enters in the same

colour shirt that he was wearing in the first act—only missing his tie, with several buttons

undone, and his sleeves rolled up, as if to indicate that his concern for appearance has subsided

for a more important value—and a pair of black cargo pants. At the opening of the second half,

we are in Jean’s apartment. The apartment is set with a sofa, armchair, coffee table, and staircase

leading to a platform, as well as with the TV—that will become a central, pivotal set piece in the

development of the rest of the play—a partially-completed cardboard protest sign, a small fern,

and a Molotov cocktail. I directed the beginning of this scene as a kind of cat and mouse game

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between Bérenger and the dancers, setting up the comedic gag that they must avoid being seen in

the apartment to avoid his outrage even though we have established that they mean no harm.

Jean and the rhinoceroses communicated through their actions that what they were doing could

be considered illegal or somehow wrong and in an act of self preservation, hid the evidence of

support for their cause and withheld their plans until the end of the scene where Bérenger reacts

as they had expected he would.

The message on the sign that Jean was writing read: “ΟΤΑΝ Η ΕΙΡΗΝΙΚΗ

ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ ΓΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΑΔΗΝΑΤΗ Η ΒΙΑΙΗ ΓΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΑΝΑΓΚΑΙΑ,” which translates to

“When peaceful revolution becomes impossible then violence becomes necessary,” which was

taken from a photograph of a piece of graffiti in Athens echoing a popular sentiment by John F.

Kennedy. I chose this phrase for Jean’s sign because it is the only sign that is a call to arms with

regard to encouraging violence. Likewise with the profanity that was spoken in Greek, this sign

was not a blatant encouragement for the members of the audience to take violent action because

only a fraction of the audience would understand its meaning, and for that fraction, I wanted to

foreshadow the rioting to come.

Before going any further, as the second half of the show is rife with Greek text on protest

signs, it bears noting that I am and have always been fully aware of the fact that the vast

majority—and on many nights, not a single person—would be able to read the signs. This was

never a concern for me. I knew that if the signs were the make or break between understanding

the show and being completely in the dark as to what was happening, then I had failed. The

Greek text on the set was a gift to the audience members in the audience that could read and

understand Greek; to everyone else it was unintelligible graffiti. I tried to be deliberate to ensure

that the storytelling did not depend on the Greek text; but I was also particular about which signs

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to include, as if the audience would be entirely Greek speaking. The only text in English that

appeared on the set was “ANTIFA” which may as well have been written in a foreign language

to those that are not familiar with the anti-fascist organization. I know this because I was one of

those people who while walking through the streets of Greece assumed it was another soccer

team or political party. I had the luxury of typing the word into Google, but because audience

members do not have that privilege during a live show, it was a meaningless acronym.

Jean’s transformation into an anarchist was a blatant deviation from the text. Jean

transforms in the original text, and his transformation is consistent with the rest as he becomes a

beast, no matter what the bestial metaphor represents, but the difference was that his

transformation in our production went one step further. I wanted to differentiate Jean, not only as

the only transformation that Bérenger witnesses firsthand, but I wanted to raise the stakes. It was

not just that Jean was transforming into a protester, he was transforming into a radical, with

intent to cause property damage, as indicated by the Molotov cocktail and the gasmask. As I

have noted, there was, as there often is, an ideological divide between the protesters in Greece,

where some gathered with signs, and others took to more extreme and violent measures, i.e.,

engaging with law enforcement in the streets, throwing stones, homemade Molotov cocktails,

and arriving clad as if for battle.

The most drastic revision I made to this scene was the erasure of the epidemic of

Rhinoceritis, which entailed large swaths of text being cut from the show. This was necessary for

a number of different reasons, the first and I think the most obvious is to serve the portrayal of

the nature of the transformation as being conscious, voluntary, and empowering. The

connotations of the transformations being the result of a contagion feeds into the conformist

narrative, as well as suggesting that the transformations were unhealthy. These ideas drastically

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contradicted my conception of the rhinoceroses and were necessarily cut. A testament to the

strength, but also to the ambiguity of the script, is that this element can be removed without

compromising the clarity of the story. The reason for the transformations was no longer

happenstance, it was no longer something you were exposed to and contracted, it was no longer

something that erased one’s individuality; it was a choice, which further complicates Bérenger’s

reaction as a matter that is personal, ideological, and not for him to criticize.

The transition into Act Three was augmented slightly insofar as Jean’s elderly neighbours

were reconceived as police officers. These two characters have a short interaction with Bérenger

at the beginning of his scene with Jean which I cut expressly for the purposes of preserving the

momentum that I established with the antecedent moment in Jean’s apartment with the dancers

just prior to returning from intermission. These lines did not appear in the Samuel French copy

of the script, but appear in a Penguin Modern Classics edition by the same translator. I kept these

lines as they appeared in the text with minor revisions, replacing the word “Porter” with

“Police,” for instance, and removing the one word that indicates that the Old Man’s Wife from

offstage is speaking to her husband. This transition scene afforded us the time we needed to

move the set pieces and reset the stage for Berenger’s apartment.

The most substantial revision in this final scene was the television, but this was not much

of a revision so much as it was an addition. None of the lines were changed to accommodate the

presence of the TV, but many of the lines were reimagined to refer to images on a TV. The

majority of the lines that were redirected to the TV were lines that were meant to be commenting

on action that was occurring just outside Bérenger’s window. The windows in Bérenger’s

apartment appeared high above the actor’s sightlines and were manifested with lighting gobos.

Aesthetically, this felt like an homage to Beckett’s Endgame, with the character Clov using a

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stepladder to look out the windows but because I made this connection in tech rehearsals, there

was not enough time to incorporate a stepladder, nor do I think it would have served the

storytelling enough to justify a late addition that would be so cumbersome to set. Instead, we

justified the high windows with the fact that perhaps Bérenger lived in a basement suite, and

coupled with the milk crates being used as tables, to hint at his financial status.

Daisy enters the scene having brought food, and as a way of mitigating the need for

plates and cutlery and the like, I took Daisy’s line stating that she “had a lot of trouble finding

food...[as] The shops have been plundered,” (111) and Dudard’s line expressing his distaste for

“tinned food,” (113) and decided that this was an opportunity to add another Greek element.

Dolmades are a Greek dish made with rice, spices (and sometimes beef), wrapped in boiled

grape leaves, and I know that unless one is making them at home, they are most often sold in

pull-tab tins. This proved perfect because the briny liquid in the tin was clear, making it

relatively costume friendly compared to tinned foods kept in red sauces (i.e., my second option,

gigantes beans, literally translating to ‘giant beans’) that are more likely to stain.

One aspect of the script that had always baffled me was Daisy’s romantic interest in

Bérenger by the end of the play. Was he literally the last man on earth? Did she see something in

him that no one else could? Likewise, Daisy did not seem like the type of person to tolerate

being slapped across the face. One addition that our production added in this regard that felt

necessary to not only justifying Daisy’s exit, but also in depicting her transformation as

empowerment rather than capitulation, was a second slap administered by Daisy following

Bérenger’s initial slap. The two consecutive slaps were choreographed in such a way to make

Bérenger’s slap seem impulsive, unsure, and feeble, whereas Daisy’s was measured, intentional,

and devastating, enough to make him spin 360-degrees and fall back onto the couch like a

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character from a cartoon, threatening a third slap after her retaliation but choosing to take the

higher ground. I was concerned with depicting Daisy as a trope of a battered wife as that would

lend a completely different set of connotations to her emancipatory transformation. Becoming a

rhinoceros was not Daisy’s last resort, or a desperate option that she was forced into by

Bérenger; I wanted that act to be as deliberate as anything else she has done throughout the

course of the play, and for that moment to be a critical realization for her that she is worth more

and deserves to be treated better.

Once Bérenger launched into his final monologue, the rhinoceroses re-entered the space

and the lights denoting Bérenger’s room began to shrink. One of the lines that helped me to

convince myself that the shift in context was feasible is Daisy’s observation that the rhinoceroses

were “singing” (127) and Bérenger’s retort that they were instead “roaring,” which led me to

imagine a scenario where they were, in fact, singing, and furthermore, trusting Daisy’s account,

that they were “playing as well, and dancing.” Following Daisy’s transformation, I took creative

liberty with the staging of the rhinoceroses appearing onstage and beginning to encroach on the

space, in particular, choreographing a simple Καλαµατιανό—a traditional Greek dance—

teaching them the twelve steps that are predominantly variations on a grapevine, and the

rhythmic cadence that accompanies it.

Because Ionesco’s script is structured as an allegory, there is a level of ambiguity that is

necessarily present that allowed the original text to make a political commentary without being

explicit; this ambiguity served us as it allowed us to imprint our own political commentary and

gave us the space to make major alterations without compromising the integrity of the story.

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CHAPTER FOUR: (RE)DIRECTING RHINOCEROS

Collaborating with Designers

The lifespan of an idea does not necessarily follow a logical progression from genesis to

fruition, and for me, it often begins with something outside of myself. This means that part of my

directorial process involves becoming obsessed with a piece of music, or a style of visual art, or

a philosophical idea, etc., which rarely ends there. It extrapolates from there and ties itself to

other related concepts and mediums, and each thread weaves itself into the larger picture of how

I understand and imagine the play on stage. Because designers speak the language of the medium

they work in (i.e., visual images, light, sound, etc.) the impulse to seek inspiration in these

mediums can translate and lead to meaningful dialogues.

I have developed an enormous amount of respect for designers and technicians for their

ability to translate the abstract into the tangible. In working with some truly remarkable

designers I have learned to relinquish my impulse to micromanage and control every aspect of

the show and trust that they are far more competent in their area of specialization than I am. This

not only alleviates the burden of feeling like I need to solve every creative problem that arises,

but likewise it prompts me to reframe those problems and articulate why they are not working.

For example, I needed a sound cue to underscore a transition, and my immediate impulse was to

offer a specific musical track or sound. Dictating the sound I wanted would have stifled any new

ideas that my sound designer might have been able to generate, and would have shut out

potentially new and more effective thoughts. Because of my tendency to want artistic control,

this was an important lesson, and one that I feel I needed to learn with professionals at the helm.

Often this impulse comes from my inclination to pull inspiration from music which can

sometimes conflict with a designer whose job it is specifically to design the sound. Likewise

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with the crossover of visual art and scenography; an image will inform an impulse, or a lead to

discovering a through-line, or illuminate an insight or a revelation into the play, and it becomes

critically important to how I conceive of the piece and I end up imposing it on my designers.

Sometimes I will find parallels to novels, other plays, or poetry. This intertextual, intermedial,

and interpersonal influence is a recurring and unpredictable element to my process. I find that

unless I am engaging with art, or media, or ideas peripheral to the main, the well dries up: like

breathing the stale air in a sealed room. This habit also stems from working independently with

small budgets and on my own written work, where, as the director, I felt compelled to create a

fully formed conception of the play, which included the additions of certain visuals and sounds.

In my writing I tend to work with images, leitmotifs, so an obstacle that I am admittedly still

working to overcome is being less prescriptive.

Something each of the designers said to me on multiple occasions was “it is your thesis,”

not to defer to me as the creative authority on the work, but to ensure that their designs matched

my vision for the show, and, in a sense, I think this gave me permission to offer my aesthetic

preferences on the designs which, for me, made the process feel more collaborative.

The Set and Props Design

The general idea behind the set design remained consistent over the course of the

reconceptualization: moving from an outdoor, public space, to progressively more indoor, private

spaces. Knowing that I wanted the playing space for the office scene to be elevated to facilitate

Mrs. Boeuf’s fall and the collapsing staircase, Scott and I initially talked about a set of three-

tiered rotating scaffolding units with removable fronts. Part of this design choice and my desire

for the height was meant to dwarf Bérenger in stature by the final scene in his own apartment. In

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our production, we emphasize Bérenger’s narrow-mindedness and self-centered consideration

and isolation in the face of a larger issue without trying to understand it or relate it to the world

outside of himself. Bérenger chooses to barricade himself inside his apartment in the third Act,

and his safe sanctuary by the end becomes a kind of prison. This design necessarily evolved to fit

into the budget, and the design that Scott reconfigured was not only more practical for everything

we had intended to use it for, but also easier to maneuver, making for smoother transitions.

The move from public to private in a traditional reading of the play “metaphorically

suggests a fundamentally different approach to interpreting this play as a commentary on mass

hysteria [and] social conformity…suggests that turning into a rhinoceros is less an act of public

mass hysteria and more of a private decision with private consequences.” (Reassessing, 92) But

in our interpretation of the play, it served more to isolate Bérenger and highlight the fact that

prejudice is more freely expressed in the home, and public debates about issues are more

concerned with trivialities like the ones discussed in the first Act, i.e., number of horns. Bérenger

does not start spouting hateful anti-rhinoceros phrases until the third Act, when he says things

like “Man is superior to the rhinoceros,” (Rhinoceros, 114) insisting that “We must attack the

evil at its roots,” (99) and suggesting that, as a solution, “They should be all rounded up in a big

enclosure, and kept under strict supervision,” (111) which, to me, came close to resembling Nazi

propaganda with the veiled reference to concentration camps. Daisy and Dudard’s responses to

this last comment can be read as dismissive, but I chose to attach a judgment to it, treating that

suggestion and the mere mention of it as absurd and unacceptable.

Bennett posits that “the tragedy of the play…is, in part, precipitated by the fact that what

should remain private does not and what should be made public remains private.” (Reassessing,

92) Bérenger’s prejudice is amplified behind closed doors, and to some extent, he is looking for

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validation from Dudard and Daisy when he speaks poorly of the rhinoceroses and degrades

people that he once had respect for on the basis of their transformation.

Given that we afforded the permission to use moving platforms, and the actors would be

standing on them, I knew that we would need to incorporate some kind of locking mechanism. I

requested that we find an alternative to the floor locks for the castors, affectionately referred to

as ‘elephant feet’—presumably named for the cacophonous noise they make when you need to

lock or unlock them. Rotating platforms fitted with chain-link fences were the primary set pieces

in my pre-thesis production, Woyzeck, and those platforms used this style of locking mechanism

because they fit into our budget for that show, but they presented such an obstacle with regard to

sound that I wanted to avoid them altogether. Scott proposed air castors that locked using a

hydraulic mechanism.

The graffiti in Act One was modeled after real graffiti from Athens. The style I wanted

for the graffiti was minimal, hastily scrawled, simply keeping the focus on the meaning and the

act of spray-painting walls with dissent as a way of protest rather than artfulness. I wanted the

graffiti to come across as vandalism, not decorative or ornamental as some graffiti can be. I

achieved this by establishing that graffiti was unacceptable in the opening scene with the

rhinoceroses entering covertly in the middle of the night to tag the shop windows and following

this with an explosive reaction of disapproval from the shopkeepers in the section that followed.

The walls were off-white, intended to look distressed to reflect the deterioration of the

country. I would have liked the walls to have been distressed even further, perhaps broken

bricks, or an incomplete section of chipped or imperfect brick to look more ruinous than

weathered, but time and budget were a factor. I do not think this would have contributed to

clearer storytelling, or filled in any gaps in the audience’s understanding of the play and how it

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was to unfold, this was purely an aesthetic preference, and in the interest of time and budget, I

have learned that sometimes compromises need to be made and clarity of storytelling takes

precedence over cosmetic preferences.

One through line that carried over from the original concept was the planted foliage. The

purpose of this was to communicate the state of the community and serve as a metaphor for our

need to control everything in our world. All the greenery was, foremost fake, but beyond that, all

potted. Nothing grew from the ground; everything was domesticated. This was meant to be a

metaphor that perhaps only came to fruition at the end through the dead plant in Bérenger’s

apartment, but would nonetheless be a presence throughout the whole play. Originally this was

meant to symbolize the way our lives are controlled in ways that we do not always recognize,

specifically through the political and economic systems to which we ascribe ourselves and the

illusion of perfect nature through manicured flowers. I think this metaphor holds true even with

my interpretation, even though the focus was no longer on conformism and brainwashing. It was

still about corruption, and Bérenger’s dead houseplant represents a perhaps once thriving living

organism suffocated in a pot by conditions that could no longer sustain it. I noticed in certain

parts of Greece that there are trees growing beside the road that yield fruit: limes, lemons, figs,

apples, etc., and vines growing over buildings, and the urban infrastructure seems more

integrated with the natural flora than it does in Canada and the United States. This was a key

factor in rethinking a design element that was being carried over from the previous context.

The television was integral to establishing Bérenger’s own hysteria and his developing

prejudice toward the rhinoceroses. The television worked in tandem with the windows of

Bérenger’s basement apartment, serving as a second conduit to the outside world. Throughout

the play, there were two sources of news: the television prevalent in the second half, and

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newspapers throughout. One thing that struck me about this play in my earlier readings of the

text was how information travels and how it is distorted. I wanted to take this one step further

with the television. In the first Act, people who directly witnessed the rhinoceroses passing

through discuss the phenomenon and get nowhere in their discussion, spending the majority of

the time arguing about what they looked like rather than the implications. As the play progresses,

they start making judgments and taking positions on the rhinoceroses, and by the end of the play,

their positions are adamant without ever really defining what it is the rhinos stand for or

represent, and by extension, what it is about them and their presence that they disagree with.

With regard to the TV, targeted marketing and specifically tailored ads on social media have

created a kind of confirmation bias wherein we are only fed information that we agree with

because we follow people and organizations that we support. This does not challenge us to think

critically about what we see from an opposing point of view, and news media is notoriously

biased in how it presents facts and statistics. Because Bérenger is so connected to this kind of

media through phone and TV, I wanted to remove any critical thinking from Bérenger’s position,

especially because in arguing with Dudard, he concedes that “[he is] not very well up in

philosophy. [He has] never studied; [whereas Dudard has] all sorts of diplomas,” (104) and has

trouble even formulating a cogent argument beyond feeling his opinions “instinctively” and

“intuitively,” qualities that he feels the need to differentiate and ascribes the former to the

rhinoceroses. In challenging this half-baked argument, Bérenger perceives Dudard as aggressive

and appeals to the authority of the Logician, who by this point has himself transformed.

The set featured hand-scrawled graffiti in the first Act, and was integral to realizing my

new vision for the show. Because Scott and I had our preliminary meetings before I left for

Greece, this was a late addition but necessary for understanding the world and tying together my

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vision for the show. I provided Scott with samples, opting for the minimalist scrawl rather than

the more elaborate murals, privileging the message over the aesthetic representation. The graffiti

to an extent was an extension of the world and symbolic of the voiceless chorus. Once the

characters transformed fully into rhinoceroses, they were no longer able to speak or iterate. This

runs contrary to Ionesco’s depiction of them, as the original text includes utterances made by the

rhinoceroses, especially in Jean’s transformation scene. The transition into rhinoceros in

Ionesco’s text was originally a contagion that made the afflicted turn green, breathe heavily, and

even vocalize with an animalistic “Brrr.” (Rhinoceros, 86) I chose to silence the rhinoceroses and

obviously move away from the epidemic angle because I do not consider rallying behind a cause

to be inherently a contagion with negative connotations. Like the graffiti in Athens, I wanted our

graffiti to symbolize the silenced voices of the discontented youth. Young people in Greece seem

to have very little influence in terms of influencing government policy beyond organizing

demonstrations and expressing their dissatisfaction through vandalism and confrontation, relying

on politicians to advocate for their needs and their future. I do not condone violence, and have

seen footage of the riots and the aggression, but in the interest of understanding their thought

process, it is a fact that needs to be acknowledged. Graffiti is so often seen as a blight, or as an

act of vandalism, and is often associated as something perpetrated by the youth particularly of

the less affluent lower class. Our associations with it are already somewhat negative, and part of

the experiment was to tie it to social activism and get the audience to empathize with a

generation of young people who have no other say in the affairs of their government than to

spray it on the walls. In Athens, it was impossible to dismiss. They had made it impossible to

dismiss. I wanted it to stick out like a sore thumb on our set while still adhering to the grey scale

palette; a request Scott generously obliged in full.

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The Costume Design

The concept behind Jennifer Lee Arsenault’s costumes was twofold: the first stage was

colourful, stylish, and slightly over the top, meant to suggest a bygone opulence, the remnants of

a more prosperous time, distressed by the hardships of a financial recession. I wanted everything

about their clothes to appear ‘lived in’, as if they have worn their Sunday Best every day for the

last ten years. To this end, I asked Jennifer to be heavy-handed distressing the costumes. There’s

a suggestion of pride in this design: a town full of people struggling to make ends meet, arrive

dressed to the nines everyday so that the economic conditions they face seem somehow

diminished, still clinging to the prosperity and accomplishments of generations past. This ties

into my own identity and how it is informed by the notion of what is ‘Greek’, and how my notion

of ‘Greek’ is informed twofold by the Western perception of Greece and a romanticized

upbringing. National borders are imaginary constructs and have been augmented and diminished

by wars, kings, treaties, etc., and it was not until my recent trip to Greece that it became

abundantly clear that Greece’s cultural identity is informed by so many outside influences, i.e.,

the Ottoman and Venetian occupations, and other prominent neighbouring cultures through trade

routes. Even the tradition of shadow puppetry was a Turkish influence that became popular

under their rule. The revelation that my homogenous cultural identity, which up until this point

has been defined as distinctly ‘Greek,’ has conspicuous Eastern influences that many Greeks I

knew grew up, family included, took pains to differentiate themselves from.

This first stage, aligned with the public setting, was meant to set up a country that is lying

to itself. We have storefronts defaced with phrases of dissent being scrubbed away by

shopkeepers who are affected by the message but ashamed to be a billboard for it, contrasted by

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the fashionable, albeit shabby clothing worn by the people. Bérenger and Jean spend the entirety

of Act One drinking brandy, but when the bill comes, and Jean has left, Bérenger is unable to

pay, and is tasked with scrubbing graffiti off the wall. The fact that Act One is set on Sunday

afternoon, means that many of them would have attended church that morning, and lends

credence to the choice beyond these larger implications.

The second stage of costumes was a grey-scale iteration of the character’s first stage

costumes and took effect after they were revealed to have transformed. This shift was intended to

complement the ideas that went into the set design, indicating an acceptance and reflection of the

state of their country, as well as to be evocative of newspaper photos. This shift to grey-scale

was accompanied by a shift in where the colour was coming from now that the clothing was in

black-and-white, indicating that the colour was not lost altogether but was manifested differently,

which I will discuss further in the following section on lighting. This transformation was most

distinct with Daisy’s onstage quick-change. Daisy’s transformation happens rather dramatically

as she crosses the threshold out of Bérenger’s apartment, spinning out of a yellow, floral-print,

knee-length summer dress, to reveal an identically-cut, solid grey dress underneath. This moment

was accompanied by the presence of the rhinoceros chorus dancers who wheeled the door to her

and literally beckoned her out before carefully fitting a mask over her face.

The concept behind the masks followed a similar evolution. I was interested in the

varying stages of transformation, as one of Ionesco’s criticisms within the play itself is that they

efface any sense of individuality. This did not serve my message, but moreover, it did not seem

accurate in the world that I had set up. A mob may be afflicted with a group mentality, but a

group of protesters is comprised of individuals with a shared ideology or value system. The act

of protesting seems like an assertion of individuality on a system that denies individuals the

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agency to make a change. Protesting, to some degree, seems inherently tied to an assertion of

identity and is often related to the human rights issues being advocated for.

Naturally, the masks are a cornerstone design consideration for any director undertaking

this show, and bears a great deal of weight with regard to the tone and the perception of the

rhinoceroses. It was important to me that the rhinoceroses were not depicted as menacing, but

also that they were not seen to be literally transforming into beasts. As a way to address the issue

of retaining their individuality, I wanted to be able to see their faces. In our initial conversations,

I pitched my desire for the masks to go from bare frames, to partially covered, to fully covered in

order to reflect the gaining momentum of the movement. Jennifer engineered a way for the actors

to wear lightweight masks made from coat hangers that fit over their ears like eyeglasses.

Jennifer constructed six masks for the dancers alone: one per dancer per Act, beginning with bare

wire masks and ending with the same template of bare wire mask covered with a translucent grey

mesh-like material that acted like a scrim, in that under indirect lighting the material would look

translucent, and under more direct lighting the material would appear more opaque. The dancer’s

masks in particular needed to be lightweight and stable to allow for their more complicated

movement sequences. Jennifer was able to provide them with prototypes early on to give them an

opportunity to rehearse with them.

Jean’s gas mask was meant to be a departure from the wire masks that the rest of the

protesters wore as Jean comes to represent something more than the average protester: Jean

represents the anarchic groups throwing pipe bombs and tear gas at police, groups like the

Revolutionary Organization 17 November, and leftist trade-unionists PAME. Jean’s function as a

character is still to represent a counterpoint for Bérenger, but in our new context, counterpoint

meant anarchic. One thing that has always struck me about Jean in the original text is his

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hypocrisy; berating Bérenger for being a slob and a drunkard as he takes slugs of his own drink. I

did not want to lose the richness of their friendship and the crisis it undergoes; as well I did not

want to present the rhinoceroses as a homogenous group with pristine intent when the reality is

that people were hurt during the protests. To ignore this would be dishonest, and Jean was the

perfect vehicle for making this distinction and representing that aspect of the protests.

The Lighting Design

Having worked with this undergraduate lighting designer on my pre-thesis show,

Woyzeck, the previous year, I came into Rhinoceros with an unwavering trust and fierce

admiration for her work: from the spotlight that followed the titular character throughout the

entire production, changing colours four times to reflect his instability and in reference to his

mention of feeling ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ in the script; to the microphones underneath the stage used to

amplify Woyzeck’s footsteps; to her omnidirectional sound design based on theoretical

discussions we had about displacing sound from source, I had high expectations and trusted her

ability to deliver. As the only undergraduate designer on Rhinoceros, her ambitious thinking has

been criticized as lofty and potentially difficult to execute, but her creativity knows no bounds,

and she has proven herself fully capable of executing these grand ideas with a work ethic that

borders on obsessive. Under the supervision of our set designer, Scott Reid, our lighting designer

created through lines in the lighting that were both elegant and effective in establishing both the

realism and the surrealism alike with a flair that has become signature to her work.

We had the same idea separately to track a lighting progression in Act One to reflect the

passing of a full day. The idea was to start the show just before dawn, and from there, proceed to

create a time-lapse lighting sequence of an entire day over the course of the thirty-odd-minute

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Act, ending at dusk with the setting sun, suggesting the end and potentially new beginning of a

cycle. The only interruptions to this sequence were the two shifts when the rhinoceroses entered,

wherein breakup gobos and coloured lighting indicated a shift in reality and a departure from the

more naturalistic daylight. During the ‘dusk’ lighting states, our lighting designer also added

three pools of light that were meant to be streetlights; a detail that I felt tied the concept behind

the lighting shifts together. During the transition from ‘dusk’ to ‘dawn,’ these streetlights faded,

along with light bulbs behind the awnings illuminating the storefronts. This state acted as our

preshow and transitional lighting state into the next scene as well.

Act Two, Scene One, in the office, we installed two overhead units with LEDs to act as

practical office lighting. These lights provided the anemic glow that suggested the actors were

under fluorescents. Because these lights were LEDs and had the capacity to change colour, our

lighting designer paired them with additional LEDs underneath the platforms and programmed a

colour shift for Mrs. Boeuf’s fall. Once again, a moment that interrupts the otherwise naturalistic

office scene, became an opportunity to reflect this disruption in the lighting.

The lighting in Act Three was the culmination of everything we had set up with colour up

until that point. Our lighting designer’s window gobos illuminated the top-most third of the

platforms helping to dwarf Bérenger, as well as give the impression that the apartment was

below ground. These windows worked in tandem with the TV and spotlights when characters

that transformed made their cameo appearances onstage: Mr. Papillon in green, the Logician in

purple, and Ms. Botard in blue. Because these characters were appearing onstage but were meant

to be understood as appearing on Bérenger’s TV, the lighting design was essential to

communicating that spatial separation.

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The lighting designer’s TV effect in the second half of the show following intermission

was key in following the through-line of the role of technology in the play. An image that I’d had

in my head and become obsessed with from the moment I decided to take this contextual

approach to the play was the final image; Bérenger seated in front of a television set, lit only by

the flickering light, while a crash of rhinoceroses rioted around him, crossing into his space

completely dismissive of his presence, with the exception being when they stopped to look at

themselves on the TV. Our lighting designer, with the help of her supervisor, gutted the outer

casing of a modern CRT TV, installed an LED light inside of it, and covered the front with a

screen to make it look like the TV could be turned on and off, and rigged it to be controlled from

the tech booth.

Over the last two years, my preference for transparent transitions and more specifically

my reticence toward blackouts for transitions has surfaced as a core aesthetic value. I think that

my attention to peripheral focus has allowed me to confront and articulate why I prefer to divert

attention between action rather than black it out; I strive to keep the staging active as much as

possible in my work, and blackouts create a lull in the action. Further reflection makes me

wonder if my staging is too busy, and if this aesthetic is alienating or dizzying for an audience.

Given the priority I place on story, however, I think it is important that every aspect of the

staging and every moment be contributing to the telling of the story.

The Sound Design

Because of how late in the process Luke Dahlgren was hired, and how integral music was

to my vision of the show, I had taken the initiative to compile tracks and assign them to different

scenes and transitions. It was important to me that we used exclusively Greek music, but from a

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range of genres that reflected the tone of the show as it progressed, beginning with partisan

resistance songs from World War II and the Greek Civil War, segueing into modern hip hop and

ending with an EP by a folk rock band that served as the leitmotif for the rhinoceroses passes in

Act One.

The first tracks I found and knew belonged in the show were taken from an EP entitled

“Zvara/Karakolia,” by a folk rock band called Villagers of Ioannina City. These songs featured

prominent folk melodies on traditional instruments (clarinet, bouzouki, etc.,) coupled with

distorted guitars, heavy bass drum, and raw droning vocals, all the while keeping a relatively

measured tempo. Lyrically, both of these songs have themes that run parallel to the production’s

protest spirit: ‘Zvara’ is an anthem that encourages a purging of the old and rotten to make way

for the new with an urgency to reclaim land and country; ‘Karakolia’ is a multifaceted track with

an extensive instrumental interlude (which underscored the rhinoceroses’ first and second passes

in the first act) with lyrics criticizing the police, and as if in response to the first track, a call to

arms to seize the country back from them. While police did not feature prominently in the piece,

they did make an appearance during the transition into the final act (appropriating lines that were

written to be characters that lived in Jean’s apartment complex.)

The hip hop track leading into the second half of the show was called “Ζόρια,” and was

written by a Greek rapper who was murdered by a member of the Golden Dawn party—Greece’s

far-right fascist party—in 2013. This track is divided into two distinct sections: the first half is

more rhythmic, focusing on the artist’s identity, facing hardship with pride, and making the best

of a situation; and the second half becomes more melodic, repeating like a pop chorus, lyrically

making a statement on adversity, money, and hope. The song features on an album released in

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2012, seemingly pulling from the artist’s experience and speaking directly to people suffering

through the financial crisis.

Part of the impetus for choosing exclusively Greek music is that the majority of the

audience will not understand the lyrics (likewise with being able to read the graffiti,) so twofold

it allows me to choose music that relies on tone rather than words to elicit the message, but also,

Greek speaking audience members will be able to trace the journey in the music, identifying the

harmonious, and sometimes dissonant meld of traditional and contemporary musical sensibilities.

Those who understand the lyrics, or recognize the artists, will experience a layer to the show that

is evocative of its history and speaks to the Greek identity.

One of the early conversations that I had with Luke was in exploring the possibility of

installing subwoofers under the seating. I wanted to incorporate a tactile, experiential element for

the audience whenever the rhinoceroses passed through, making them feel as if the theatre itself

was shaking as a result of the rhinoceroses’ presence. Stylistically, this came out of my desire for

a fully sensory theatrical experience, engaging the more neglected senses, and in creating a

leitmotif that not only indicated that the rhinoceroses were onstage, but would foreground their

entrance and create anticipation attached to the sound. Once the subwoofers were approved, the

challenge became mixing the bass tone and volume so as not to deafen the audience, but still

create the desired effect. Although we only achieved a fraction of the effect that I had desired,

Luke was instrumental in offering suggestions on how to achieve this effect, explaining

rudimentary rules on how sound travels at different frequencies, and most importantly, offering

support, feedback, and maintaining an open dialogue on a design element that had earlier been

dismissed as impossible given time and funds.

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Luke was invaluable in adding texture to scenes via the sound design that I had not

thought to ask for. One such scene was Mr. Boeuf’s entrance in Act Two, Scene One, wherein I

envisioned another departure from naturalism for a particularly challenging piece of stage

direction: “Mrs. Boeuf jumps down the trap.” (Rhinoceros, 66) In the absence of a staircase,

having collapsed earlier in the scene, Mrs. Boeuf feels compelled to join her metamorphosed

husband who is several flights below her. In the text, Ionesco does not indicate that this should

be staged and rather uses the actors commenting on the action to paint the picture for the

audience, with Dudard offering that “She landed on his back in the saddle,” and “They’re off at a

gallop.” (66) I chose to stage this moment, beginning with Mr. Boeuf’s entrance, accompanied

by the dancers who lead him on with a waltz, to Mrs. Boeuf’s fall and their exit that resembled a

new bride and groom crossing the threshold into their home after the wedding.

Likewise in this scene, Luke created an effect to accommodate another challenging piece

of stage direction: “the stairs and rail collapse and a cloud of dust rises.” (60) Scott created a stair

unit that was removable from the rest of the platform, and it was important to me to show that the

stairs did not simply collapse of their own volition, but rather that the rhinoceros chorus was

responsible for it as a way of progressively depicting the rhinoceroses as becoming more

assertive and representing—or perhaps foreshadowing—the damage to infrastructure that can

happen as a result of some protests, and certainly the protests in Greece.

The curtain call was one of the most important songs, and was a tip of the hat in my own

way to Orwell’s Animal Farm. The line “Η επανάσταση µονάχα έχει ουσία / Όσο κρατάει µέχρι

να γίνει εξουσία,” which in English roughly translates to “The revolution only has merit for as

long as it lasts before it becomes power,” prompted me to choose this as the last song of the

show because it speaks to the aftermath of a revolt and the integrity of keeping the values and

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ideologies that were fought for. One of the reasons why the referendum was so infuriating for the

Greek public was because Συριζα under Prime Minister Αλεξις Τσιπρας was against austerity

and as part of its platform rejected austerity measures that were harmful to Greek citizens. The

song provided that small margin of audience members that spoke Greek with an

acknowledgement of the potential for protesting to bring about positive change, but also as a

warning that a victory is only a victory so long as it does not become the catalyst for a larger

loss. I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm because it is an anthropomorphic parable about a

revolution against tyranny that itself became tyrannous. It felt relevant to the play in that Ionesco

has done something similar with rhinoceroses acting as a stand in for him to make a commentary

on a particular political ideology and historical circumstance.

Mapping Out the Rehearsal Process

Before leaving for Greece I wanted to ensure that I was on track to return in September

and hit the ground running: I met with each of my designers to discuss my vision for the show,

secured an undergraduate choreographer whom I tasked with casting two undergraduate dancers,

and packed my dog-eared copy of the script to work while I was away. The one question that I

left looming was whether I would enlist the help of an assistant director out of the handful of

students that approached me expressing interest; I was reticent, in part because I was still

proprietorial about ‘my thesis’, but primarily because I have never worked with an assistant

director before and I wanted to make sure that this would be a mutually beneficial experience.

I left knowing that the majority of my preparation would be solidifying my understanding

of the text and threading the new context—which, at this point, was still the American political

angle—into the source material. Ionesco’s text is divided into four scenes: Act One (set in the

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village square with the full company of actors,) Act Two, Scene One (set in the office,) Act Two,

Scene Two (set in Jean’s apartment,) and Act Three (set in Bérenger’s apartment.) The section

that was the most intimidating for me was easily Act One; with a cast of eleven actors and

dancers onstage at once, this scene would prove to be the most involved piece of staging I had

ever undertaken to coordinate up until that point, which, while it was one of the challenges I

knowingly chose to embrace and impose on myself when choosing this script, was still daunting.

Because I felt fairly confident with the living room scenes, I chose to focus more of my

attention on conceiving of how to execute the full cast ensemble scenes. This entailed thinking

spatially about where I wanted key moments to occur, where I wanted new characters to enter,

and the plotting traffic given Scott’s preliminary set designs and arrangement of scenic elements.

I gave some consideration to the opening ‘καληµέρα’ sequence that occurred before getting into

the text, but could not imagine the specificity of the staging without bodies in space. I was

imagining organized chaos, and the organization felt impossible to coordinate without actors.

In preparation for the second half of the show, I familiarized myself with the script and

locked into the essential character relationships so that I could better help the actors navigate

them using their intentions and relationships once we hit the stage. In addition to better

familiarizing myself with the script, I needed to also defamiliarize the script from my original

conceptions and start fresh. Because my new conceptualization was inspired in Greece, the

majority of my preparation was in making sure that all of the component pieces fit together with

the new concept by close reading the script and troubleshooting the discrepancies. I was hesitant

to make substantial line cuts before I had decided definitively whether or not I would commit to

the new concept. As I mentioned, there was a period of self-doubt where I was not sure if I was

doing the right thing to abandon the old concept, or if the new concept was perhaps too

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ambitious, so this made much of the preparation an act of weighing and deliberating on which

direction I would take at the fork in the road.

Auditions and Callbacks

I returned from Greece on September 4th, and held auditions on September 6th and 7th. I

saw thirty-nine actors at varying points in their training and from there, knew I needed to choose

a cast of nine: five men, four women.

The first round of auditions were standard fare: actors were asked to prepare monologues,

which I would then disrupt with a piece of direction requiring them to recontextualize based on

what I needed to see from them. A difficult confession became an impassioned accusation; a

retelling of a personal and traumatic anecdote became a joke in a bar, etc. I did this as a litmus

test to gauge their flexibility and get a sense of how comfortable they were shifting out of their

preconceptions and thinking about a scene with a fresh perspective. This was the most important

factor to me in casting because of the nature of the show and our approach to a classic text.

Of the actors that auditioned, I invited sixteen to the first round of callbacks. I asked

Christine Brubaker, my supervisor, to lead a warm up to gauge who among them could match

pitch and follow basic rhythm. TAing her second-year acting class last year put the actors’

musical fluency on my radar as some struggled with rhythm in particular. I knew that I wanted to

use rhythm as a way of finding unison, so it was critical that anyone cast in the show (with the

exception of Bérenger) needed a sense of rhythm. Having Christine lead this warm-up allowed

me to step back and evaluate who was able to keep tempo and match pitch and who struggled.

After that, I asked them to participate in an abstract movement exercise/experiment,

which was, at the time, tied to my original vision for the end of the show. I played two songs by

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the band Animals as Leaders—a three-piece progressive instrumental metal band whose sound is

characterized by it is use of labyrinthine polyrhythms and tempo changes—Arithmophobia and

Apeirophobia, and asked them to let the music move them through the space, to let it affect their

physicality, find tempos within it, find stillness, find shapes with the body, interact with others,

form groups, but to ultimately connect the music to a story and let a narrative emerge. I was not

looking for anything in particular with regard to their choices, but more a willingness to make

strong choices. What I wanted to see was who felt comfortable making physical offers, as there

is a prevalent physical element to this show. Because the show deals with rhinoceroses, and more

specifically, a crash of rhinoceroses, I wanted to see who took leadership roles in the group, who

found themselves standing out from the group, who made subtle choices, who made bold

choices, and who was content to follow. I intentionally chose songs that were musically difficult

and complicated—taking the risk on them being disoriented as a result—because anyone can

count to four, and ease does not make for interesting, innovative, or evocative storytelling. This

proved to alienate some, which I fully anticipated, and in retrospect, a warm-up with an easier

song might have given them a chance to find their feet, but to an extent, I did not want them to

have that luxury, or be able to anticipate their movements from a warm-up round.

Afterward, I chose scenes for the actors to cold read to get a sense of their voices in the

roles and to move to a more conventional callback scenario. I did not come in with a list of

combinations of actors I wanted to see, I came in with scenes and fit the actors from there. Some

surprises came out of this, in particular a first year actress that became a front-runner for the role

of Daisy, necessitating a second round of callbacks.

The second round of callbacks were held exclusively to finalize casting for three roles:

Daisy, Bérenger’s love interest; Botard, the school teacher from the office scene who refuses to

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believe in the rhinoceros phenomenon (double-cast in the role of Housewife who only appears in

the first act); and Mr. Papillon, the boss from the office scene (double-cast in the role of Old

Gentleman, who, likewise, only appears in the first act). This round of callbacks was much

smaller and was comprised of various combinations of cold reads, and I found that this allowed

me to identify qualities that the actors were bringing to the roles, rather than try to tease out the

character’s qualities or coerce them into bringing out those qualities in themselves. I took into

consideration experience, comfort, chemistry. This was an important learning moment for me

that I am only realizing in retrospect, partly because the majority of my casting experience in the

past involved approaching friends who were actors and offering them roles until I had a cast, so

being on the other side of the auditioning experience is still relatively new for me. With Botard, I

knew I wanted to cast a woman in the role, partly because they would also be cast in the role of

Housewife, but also because I wanted a balanced cast of men and women, and Botard is not

explicitly gendered in the text. I considered casting a woman in the role of Papillon, but I did not

want to represent the not-so-subtle pass that he makes on Daisy as any kind of reflection on or

equation between gay female characters and abusive male characters; Old Gentleman could have

easily been Old Gentlewoman, but likewise, this character makes unwanted advances on the

Housewife, and I did not want to portray or mislead that this interaction was lewd for any other

reason than the advance was unwanted.

Part of the challenge of this play was casting from a pool of young actors and taking on

the task of teaching as well as directing. With both my thesis and pre-thesis productions, I found

myself making decisions based on who I would have an easier time directing, which for my

thesis in particular, meant looking at actors who I knew already spoke my language and knew

my style of working and expectations. As a result, I recast many of the actors I worked with

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during Woyzeck. Out of these callbacks, I decided on a clear lead and cast an ensemble around

him, but that decision in and of itself was more complicated than it should have been.

Casting a role like Bérenger comes with a multitude of considerations, not simply with

regard to the size and difficulty of the role itself, but also because of the function that Bérenger

as a character plays in the story as a whole. Bérenger is the protagonist of the play, as well as the

antithesis to the rhinoceroses and all that they represent; it is in this juxtaposition that the

audience, through Bérenger, derives meaning from the play. Needless to say, casting the right

actor in the role of Bérenger would be pivotal to the cohesion of the show moving forward.

Every casting decision is to some extent a leap of faith, and this is exactly how I approached

casting the lead. There were risks that my supervisors brought to my attention with regard to

casting this role, and some resistance with regard to who I had chosen, but ultimately, my

decision was grounded in trust. I had worked with this actor the previous year on my pre-thesis,

Woyzeck, and I saw an enormous amount of potential in this actor, as well as a lot of myself.

Theatre is about taking bold risks and likewise believing in them enough to follow through, and

by this point I had already taken so many leaps that casting this actor felt like the obvious choice.

Script Cuts and Table Work

Cuts to the script were an ongoing part of the rehearsal process, but I had a working script

for the table read. Our first rehearsal was spent seated at tables in a circle. The designers

presented their designs, passed models and sketches around the table, and at that moment, we

were underway. We followed this by transcribing cuts, talking through my reimagining of the

show, and reading through the script. I did not approach table work the way I normally would.

Given the size of the cast, we did not talk about the show in terms of moments, we talked about

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the show in terms of its overarching narrative. This production could have benefitted from three

days of table work, but given our time restrictions, and everything I knew we needed to be on our

feet for, I decided to carry the table work through into the rehearsal process. I used this approach

to an extent during Woyzeck as well, but the scenes in that play, given its fragmentary nature,

were much shorter and easier to talk about at the top of each rehearsal.

Script cuts, much like the ones I made in Woyzeck, were made based on the need for

narrative continuity and clarity, as well as for time. The full and uncut text of Rhinoceros would

have easily run over three hours, and part of what differentiates theatre from other storytelling

mediums is the immediacy of the action unfolding live, and I believe if the audience loses that

immediacy they will have a hard time sustaining focus. Even Shakespeare is often condensed.

Often playwrights (myself included) want to elucidate every miniscule detail, or have characters

speak more than they need to when a gesture is often more powerful. For context, I cut and/or

condensed the show to two hours, ostensibly cutting an hour’s worth of text from the production.

I recently described my current field of research as “prioritizing the director’s intentions

over authorial intent,” and many of the cuts were made in the interest of serving my adaptation. I

am not sure if this particular reading of the text would’ve been viable without the cuts. One of

the biggest hurdles was justifying choices against the text; some scenes I had to cut more than

others, and admittedly, much of the text in Act Three was left in tact.

Negotiating the Work of the Actor

The impetus for adapting Ionesco’s play was not derived from the impulse to fix an

inherent flaw in the text; I chose to adapt this text rather than stage it as it was written because I

wanted to know if the play, steeped in its historical context, had the capacity to comment on a

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more contemporary issue, removed from its original context. Part of the message of the play as it

is written is the ambiguity of what the rhinoceroses and the humans represent and the staunch

resolution of the characters to stay on their side once they have chosen. Throughout the rehearsal

process, I have referred to Ionesco’s text and the conventional approach to it as ‘the text proper,’

and to our interpretation of the text as ‘our text’ in an attempt to both acknowledge the source

material and differentiate our interpretation of the narrative.

I dealt with this divide differently depending on which actor I was talking to, as each

character changes in a different way given the new interpretation. Daisy, for instance, is an

educated, capable woman who has seemingly fallen in love with a drunkard and a slob; it was

important to address this relationship, primarily because of Bérenger’s new role in our

production, but as well due to what it says about Daisy’s character, especially given that it

culminates in a slap that becomes the catalyst for their breakup and Daisy’s transformation. As

mentioned before, Daisy is the last to transform, and her relationship with Bérenger was for us

the only thing holding her back from achieving her true potential. I wanted her transformation to

resemble more of a liberation from an abusive, stagnating, and incompatible relationship.

Bérenger is selfish, shallow, and dependent on Daisy, and their relationship bears more

resemblance to a mother and child than to two equal and engaged lovers. I broached Daisy’s

liberation with the actress playing the role by establishing that perhaps Daisy could see latent

potential in Bérenger, and was convinced that she could be the one to help him transform from

an alcoholic into a functioning and goal-driven adult. Daisy would reward Bérenger like a child

when he was improving, and even took to helping him monitor his drinking. Daisy’s approach

was unsuccessful because it only reinforced her role as caregiver, giving Bérenger no incentive

to improve and consequentially be redeemed.

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I was originally drawn to the play by the absurdity of the premise: the transformations, its

resonance with a culture that consumes its news by quilting information from a myriad of

versions of a narrative depending on the political bend of the source(s), and the simultaneous

dichotomy of resistance and complacency embodied in the character of Bérenger. I was

captivated by the theatrical potential in representing this imminent and growing ideological

threat as a crash of rhinoceroses. When choosing this play, I was originally inspired by the

parallels between Ionesco’s play and Trump’s America. As I mentioned, this commentary felt

stale, not because it was irrelevant, but because Bérenger as a protagonist felt too feeble to carry

the burden of resistance for such a serious and immediate issue, but furthermore, because of the

ambivalence, ingrained sexism, and ignorance central to Bérenger’s character; which I found

most evident in his interactions with Daisy.

The actor playing Bérenger and I took a different approach to the character, opting for

longer chats and extensive negotiations on what makes Bérenger human beyond the caricature.

To some extent, I wanted the Bérenger of this production to be more like the shadow puppets

that piqued Ionesco’s interests in theatre—characterized by that one pervasive quality that

informs everything else—but the actor resisted; this resistance allowed us to find nuance and dig

deeper. Part of my impulse to depict Bérenger as stock is because he is unchanging; the way I

read Bérenger is as someone resistant to change, evident in his drinking, his slovenly appearance,

and his relationships to both Daisy and Jean which respectively are rooted in dependency and

discipline. If Daisy was a mother figure for Bérenger in our production, Jean was a father figure.

In the absence of a healthy model for functional relationships, Bérenger seems to cast people in

his life in roles resembling caregivers. Part of what was effective about the actor’s reticence to

see Bérenger as stock was that he believed Bérenger to be more complex than he is, allowing us

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to find the balance between a character who is tragically not self-aware enough to make the

changes necessary for his own growth and improvement, and a character that feels like the world

is against him and ultimately to blame for his own shortcomings.

Early conversations that I had with the actor in the role of Bérenger were comparing the

character to a white supremacist, where, in the spirit of role reversal, the character believes that

the rhinoceroses are a blight on the town and should be exterminated. His rhetoric supports this,

primarily in the latter half of the show, and as detestable as this ideology was to think about and

identify with, it was Bérenger’s position, and it was the actor’s job to reconcile what that meant.

This approach alienated the actor from the character, and the moment I realized this, I shifted my

approach to encouraging the actor to think of Bérenger as a young person who is privileged and

feels entitled to the status quo because it benefits him and change, and though it would make

other’s lives easier, would mean an uncomfortable adjustment for him. This was a more effective

framework and this point of reference landed us closer to the character we ended up with by

giving us a shared vocabulary and archetypal model to work from.

My lead actor, at one point, expressed that he was having trouble understanding

Bérenger, and that he felt like he had been type-cast in “whiney roles.” As a result, we had a

lengthy discussion about Bérenger in terms of the function he played in the story. Characters in

this kind of allegorical writing are tools for the playwright to communicate their message.

Character’s play roles: hero, villain, foil, comic relief, etc., and these archetypes are strategically

placed in the narrative to comment on the action or further it. Bérenger, in this production,

represents a demographic of people that get taken in by the news without taking the time to

understand what they are seeing and getting angry about. How we choose to present people like

Bérenger is demonstrative of the vantage point from which we choose to view the narrative and

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to what end. Many will argue that the problem of the play is corruption in politics, but at its

heart, it is a story of complacency in the average person. The people that transform, even in the

original context, are seduced, or pressured, or indoctrinated, or what have you, but in the

conventional reading, it is still average people allowing themselves to be taken in and it softens

the accountability. If an audience exposed to a conventional interpretation of this play was meant

to feel empowered by Bérenger’s resistance, it would only be because of Bérenger’s redemptive

moment at the last possible second, but I find Bérenger to be a pitiable character rather than a

heroic one. In our production, rather than cast him as an antagonist, the intention was to make

the audience feel like Bérenger was being left behind; that the rhinoceroses were charging

forward and he was left in their dust. Somehow, I found this to be far more tragic.

I was able to find a stark dichotomy in Bérenger and Jean as characters leaning towards

extremes, without condoning or condemning either positions, but representing them as opposites

in their respective mentalities and world views. Jean believes in the power of democracy, and

initiative, and the strength of the people as a collective. Jean believes that if the system is rotten,

the rot must be excised, suggesting that we need to “…build our lives on new foundations.”

(Rhinoceros, 85) Whereas Bérenger has faith in the systems in place, and even if it is corrupt,

believes that a new system would be regressive to the progress of mankind.

Rehearsing in the University Theatre

Working in the University Theatre for the entirety of our rehearsal process was much

different than my pre-thesis production, Woyzeck, where we worked primarily in studio rooms

and had to translate the work to the Reeve theatre in tech. Having access to this space for the full

rehearsal period allowed me to scale the actors’ performance for the large venue and integrate it

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into the approach earlier. Also, given the dimensions of our set, we needed the size of the space,

and the 180-degree amphitheater seating in the University Theatre allowed me to start to

anticipate the side banks on our thrust configuration in the Reeve Theatre. Because we had

exclusive use of the space, our set units and stage dimensions were taped out onto the floor so

that we had a visual reference for the size of our eventual performance space.

One of the biggest challenges of this show was putting together a cohesive first act and

navigating the pacing of the dialogue, as well as establishing the rhinoceroses and their

relationship to the people early on so that this departure from the original was not too jarring.

Because much of the conversations are happening simultaneously—to the effect that the two

simultaneous conversations mirror each other in form or content—the challenge was to keep

them both relevant and central without allowing one to take precedent (even though the primary

conversation was between the protagonist and his best friend and was as a result very personal,

while the secondary one was frivolous, tangential, and between two secondary characters.) One

way I navigated this was to separate the actors and run their dialogues separately, with the other

group watching. Once we established that the two conversations are parallel, I wanted them to

reflect each other’s conversational trajectory. I wanted parallel gestures and pacing. Once we

were able to get past the idea that the show is not strictly naturalistic, we started playing with

tableaus in these moments (and later more stylized movement,) using gestures that were more

representation rather than presentation.

Choreographing the ‘Flocking’ and the ‘Rioting’ Sequences

Engaging with individual actors and negotiating character motivations and relationships

was the aspect of the rehearsal process I felt most comfortable with, and arguably found to be

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much easier to execute than choreographing the large group sequences, namely what we came to

refer to as the ‘flocking’ sequence(s) in the first act, and the rioting sequence at the end.

In my early conception of the ‘flocking’ sequences, I imagined isolated individuals being

highlighted one at a time with stationary spotlights blinking them in and out of existence while

the dancers choreographed their movement around them. I wanted to explore rapidly shifting

focal points as per my thinking on Peripheral Theatre, to keep the audience’s attention on

character’s reactions rather than whatever they were reacting to. In the script, Ionesco chooses

not to stage the rhinoceroses’ first or second passes in the first act, opting instead to

communicate their existence through the menacing crescendo of “Noise,” “Trumpeting,” “The

sound of rapid galloping,” or “Deafening sounds,” and depicting the townspeople’s reaction in a

repetitive, almost frenetic kind of sequence. I originally imagined these reactions to be

disjointed, and overlapping, and the repetition a consequence of people not listening to each

other, and eventually opted to cut the text in lieu of a more unison representation. What changed

was my desire to feature the dancers, and in choosing to put them onstage, I knew I needed to

make them the focal point to demonstrate that they were no longer a malicious force, but a

graceful presence that had been there all along. As we workshopped those sections, we tried

choral exercises contrived around a shifting leader with the text Ionesco had provided, and found

it to be too restricting; the lines were not communicating anything that their physicality was not

already conveying, so we cut them and began improvising. The problem was still that allowing

them to speak pulled focus from the rhinoceroses, so eventually we cut all speaking during those

sections. One of my cast members suggested ‘flocking,’ an exercise he had recently done in his

upper level acting class, so we tried it. It was effective in that it was a departure in tone and style

from the rest of the scene’s dialogue, which helped support the notion that the rhinoceroses were

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an interruption in the town’s routine, but it also felt somehow intrinsically in agreement with the

spirit of the play and the nature of that moment.

One of the challenges of coordinating the flocking movement was the music that I chose

to underscore it. This was a sampled section from the “Zvara” track off the folk rock EP. The

issue that we encountered was that the song was written with an irregular time signature, 9/8,

which simply put, meant that the actors needed to count an extra eighth note on a standard bar of

4/4, i.e., 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and-a-…etc., which proved complicated. We choreographed a

sequence of physical gestures that changed with each bar, punctuating the gesture on the

downbeat, meaning that the last gesture held for an extra eighth note before moving to the next

gesture. I have some background in music theory, as well as a penchant for rhythmically

complicated music, so keeping time in an irregular time signature felt second nature to me, but

most popular music falls into the standard 4/4 time signature, so most people are not accustomed

to counting irregular bars, and this took some time to deconstruct for them.

The choreographer and I directed the riot at the end of the play together. It might have

been one of the first scenes of the play (as I imagined it) that I described to her when we met.

The ending was critical to the message of the show and in bringing to fruition the new role of the

rhinoceroses, and I wanted to capture something specific: a sense of ordered chaos, of constant

movement at varying tempos reminiscent of a stylized riot; and of an isolated Bérenger, lit only

by the light of the TV, looking on in disbelief. We decided to plot tracks for the actors that they

could improvise within but that ultimately prevented them from running into one another. We

used ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ tracks both upstage of the couch and on either side of it, and

designated one track just downstage of the couch and immediately behind Bérenger. The inside

tracks ran only in one direction, the outside tracks ran in the other direction, and the track behind

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Bérenger was fluid. With this final sequence, I wanted the rhinoceroses to invade Bérenger’s

space and for Bérenger not to notice as a result of being engrossed in the TV.

Much like the opening sequence, these two sections were heavily dependent on blocking,

i.e., establishing paths and adhering to the timing of the underlying music. I noticed that staging

these sections gave me mild tunnel vision with regard to things that I was paying attention to—

particularly balancing the stage, precision and unison of movement, and marking absent dancers

as part of the sequence to be added later—and it was helpful to enlist a second set of eyes to look

at what we had choreographed from an audience’s perspective; often this was one of my

supervisors, but occasionally it was the assistant director, who also took on something of a

dramaturgical role. One habit I know I often fall into in both my written and directorial work is

forgetting that the audience knows less about the action and context of the play than I do, and

backtracking to watch with fresh eyes for clarity has been an important stage of my process.

Because the play features this proliferation of rhinoceroses as its central image, working

with the ensemble and creating a strong collective presence was important to the telling of the

story, and one of the challenges ahead of me when I picked the play. Rather than a deterrent, this

was a major factor that informed my decision to pitch this show as I wanted to strengthen my

ability to work with an ensemble and feel more confident at the helm of a larger cast. I

encouraged the cast to take active roles in creating a bond and developing a close-knit ensemble

dynamic, establishing trust and a familiarity with each other’s style of working. Some of the

more senior actors stepped up to take on leadership roles within the company by leading warm-

ups, exercises, and most importantly by keeping the cast on task and focused during tech

rehearsals while I was preoccupied with overseeing the design elements.

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Integrating the Silent Chorus

I sat in on one of our choreographer’s first rehearsals with the dancers, and it was the last

one I sat in on before integrating them into rehearsals with the actors. It was held in a small

studio space with floor to ceiling mirrors and a speaker system. While the dancers took the

initiative to warm up their bodies on their own, the choreographer and I conferred over video

references she had found given a prompt from one of our meetings. After watching several short

documentaries on rhinoceroses, listening to clips of the sound they make, learning an array of

interesting fact, and watching them move and interact with one another at different stages of their

lives, I directed her to videos of baby rhinoceroses. There was a playfulness about their

movement that was stark in contrast to their parents and adult movement. I wanted the dancer’s

movement to be fluid and beautiful, with the overall quality of the movement to avoid anything

that came across as menacing or aggressive.

Watching the choreographer work was inspiring. I took about a page of notes on her

process, and after hearing her use it with the dancers, adopted the word ‘momentum’ and started

using it with the actors every chance I got. This was useful because I was finding that before I

was directing them to ‘connect’ moments, and avoid ‘dropping’ their energy, and in one word, I

had found a way to ask for both. The sequences they created for the rhinoceroses first and second

passes in the first act were organic and collaborative and the choreographer allowed the dancers

to augment the choreography so that it was comfortable in their bodies. Her direction was

minimal and succinct, giving them familiar gestures to fine tune the shape of a piece of

movement, ‘as ifs’ describing the quality of the movement, i.e., endowing a portion of the

movement with a lazy quality, or a playful quality, and seeing how these words informed the

same sequence of choreography. They worked from a place of repetition and elaboration, where

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they would build the sequence in small increments up to a point, stop, repeat as much of the

sequence as they had finished, and when they reached the end of what they had, would elaborate,

often by following the momentum of where their bodies wanted to take them afterward.

Each dancer has a distinct style: one was more experienced with floor work, and the other

was more lyrical. The choreographer was sensitive to their tendencies and rather than

choreograph a number in her style and have them learn it, she used their impulses to inform each

of their sequences. I was inspired by this style of leadership and came to adopt aspects of it into

my own practice.

Bringing the dancers into rehearsals with the actors was a much easier transition than I

had anticipated. By the time the dancers were introduced, I had already spent time working with

the actors and had given the scenes their shape, so amalgamating the two elements was a little bit

like connecting two separately filled in areas of a puzzle. With the dancers in the room, the

choreographer and I both took leadership roles with the cast as a whole, i.e., I felt comfortable

offering acting notes to the dancers, and the choreographer felt comfortable working with the

actors on their movement. Our relationship was grounded in a strong line of communication and

a shared vision of what the show would look like.

Integrating Coaches

I went into this rehearsal process feeling like I needed to climb the mountain by myself,

as if asking for help was somehow an admission of incompetency. I link this to the imposter

syndrome I have felt and, to some extent, been able to overcome, or at least found ways of

managing throughout my graduate studies. Part of this self-discovery has been learning to

differentiate between feelings of inadequacy (that stem from a bad habit of measuring myself up

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against artists that I admire) and recognizing that my limitations as an artist have helped to shape

my practice, and that they are not permanent limitations if I have the wherewithal to stay curious

and keep learning. Something I have discovered about directing is that while I am sitting in the

director’s chair, I tend to reinforce, utilize, and strengthen the tools and skillsets I already have,

whereas stepping back and watching another director’s approach provides me with the distance I

need to learn new skills and new ways of thinking and engaging with the work. I prefer the

hands-on approach—working on my feet as opposed to behind a desk—and while this practice

can be effective, it can also be overbearing. Of all the lessons I have learned this year one of the

most important ones has been learning how far back to stand (both literally and figuratively).

Part of the impulse that prevented me from asking for help was feeling like I was surrendering a

portion of creative control. As an artist, I have felt the need—and perhaps to my detriment—to

step into multiple roles at once, which has developed in me the habit of thinking cohesively

about various elements the project (i.e., sound, set, lights, etc.) which lends itself to an insular

and self-contained artistic process where the objective is to recreate on stage the images I see in

my head. This has been critical to my work as a playwright in that it has allowed me to utilize

storytelling devices beyond spoken text, as well as my work as a director in that it has led me to

find through lines and influences outside of my element. That said, and in reference to my earlier

thoughts on artistic limitations, I have learned the value of collaboration, and have started to

understand that incubating an idea without curating other artist’s input is a limitation in and of

itself when it comes to the practice of directing.

Throughout the last two years I have had the privilege of studying with two incredible

supervisors, Christine Brubaker and Valerie Campbell, and beyond taking in as much of the

wisdom they have been generous enough to offer me, I have had the opportunity to watch them

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in action which has provided me a better understanding of their methodology and approach. Both

of my supervisors have become attuned to my directorial habits and predilections and over the

last two years have found ways to instill in me these values in such a way that I felt as though I

came to them on my own. By acquainting themselves with how I work and my values as an

artist, they have figured out how best to reach me, which is not only something I admire in them

as instructors and can now aspire to myself, but also, is a quality I can reflect upon and

incorporate into my growth as a director and in coaching actors.

Last year during tech for Woyzeck, Christine offered to work with one of the actors who

was tasked with articulating a monkey puppet in a short carnival scene. I requested a puppet

from my props designer because that was how I envisioned solving that particular textual

challenge, having never worked with a puppet before, and within an hour, Christine had taught

the actor the basics of directing a puppet’s gaze, manipulating its limbs, and imbuing it with a

personality. During Rhinoceros, Christine offered to work with the cast for an hour on

embodying the physicality of an animal that can weigh upwards of two-thousand pounds, as well

as coach them on specificity with regard to the masks. I chose Rhinoceros as my thesis play,

fully aware of the embedded challenge of directing actors in masks, as well as the gap in my

directing skillset with regard to coaching actors in masks. Once again, within an hour, Christine

had made leaps and bounds with grounding the actors and refining their movement with regard

to weight distribution and where in their bodies they were leading from.

My co-supervisor, Valerie Campbell, spent some time working with the cast on unison

movement and helping me with the precision work, and to some extent, giving me the

permission I needed to obsess over the precision of the movement a little less. I had been

approaching the sequence with a mind for precision and trying to coordinate them with the

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irregular musical beat, whereas Val’s thinking was to take a more abstract approach and

disregard the rhythm of the music in favor of their collective rhythm as a group. Val encouraged

me to lean into the abstraction, or at least commit to the departure from the naturalism in that

moment, and this allowed me to surrender my compulsive need to control and perfect and allow

the movement to unfold freely rather than exactly. Through this suggestion, Val introduced the

idea of embracing less naturalistic transitions as well, which informed so much of how I dealt

with the more surreal and over the top sequences, in particular the ending. It was both liberating

and permissive in that her offers were not prescriptive; I found that by pushing me in this

direction, it was as if Val had opened me up to an entirely different palette of colours.

The only other coach that I approached to come in and run a workshop with my cast was

Jennifer Brewin, another Masters student in the department with an extensive background in

clown work, who introduced my cast to a series of games and exercises to introduce them to

clowning. Once again, I had conceived of the chorus of dancers as physically representing an arc

for the entire movement that they represented, which began as something graceful, and devolved

into a slightly more chaotic but still controlled incarnation of itself. That said, I also knew that I

wanted them present for scene transitions and to play an active role in pivotal staging moments,

i.e., the collapsing staircase and all of the transitions, and because I had conceived of them as

almost mythological trickster characters, I envisioned their movement in these scenes as being

informed by elements of clowning. Jennifer included the entire cast in the workshop, some of

whom had limited experience with clowning, but many did not—especially the dancers. This

helped me to communicate the style and tone I was aiming for, as well as gave the actors the

opportunity to bond, step outside the rigor of rehearsals, and explore a different kind of work.

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These examples were critical in landing the lesson that though I may be able to conceive

of a particular staging or solution to a problem I encounter in the text, I am limited in my ability

to execute everything I imagine by myself and will naturally have gaps that require different

skillsets. More importantly though, Christine’s intervention helped me to reflect on my own

detrimental habits and a somewhat egotistical approach to theatre making that not only burdens

the ill-equipped artist but also stifles the potential of the production. In this document I have

written extensively about my thoughts on authorial intent and the role of the director, and

foremost, it seems that the director’s role is above all a leadership role, which I have come to

learn often entails relinquishing control and allowing myself to trust others to find their own

initiative, as well as set aside my ego and any prevailing ideas of ownership and control that

inform my need to do everything myself. If my perceptions of directing boil down to leadership,

then I feel as though collaboration has a lot to do with finding the balance and equality of ideas

in the creative process which is grounded in trusting the input of my collaborators. I still believe

that a director’s function in a theatrical production is to coordinate the moving parts and hold the

larger vision for the show—the interlocutor between all collaborators involved—but this can be

accomplished by establishing clear and open lines of communication, and giving the

collaborators space to work rather than feeling the need to oversee everything at all stages.

Tech Week and ‘The Violence of Decision Making’

In the week leading up to tech, notably the last few days, the show felt under prepared,

and as a result, I was starting to feel insecure about what we had created and whether or not it

made any kind of sense. I felt like any shortcomings on the part of the production were my fault,

and that it was too late to recover. Many of my concerns, in retrospect, were grounded in my

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inability to see the whole production unfolding fluidly onstage as it did in my head, and likewise,

but probably more importantly, the actors’ inability to see it. This was stressful because time was

running out and we’d soon have an audience. It was important to hide this from the cast because

I needed them to stay positive and have faith that it would come together.

Once we began integrating tech, there was a palpable shift in the room, and suddenly I

felt like I was following through on a promise. Because the actors are not involved in production

meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for them to appreciate all the wheels that are set in motion

outside of rehearsals. Seeing everything come together reinstated their trust in me and renewed

their excitement for the project. While this was reassuring for me, and was one less thing to

worry about, it did not change or lessen the pressure I had put on myself and was feeling from

those around me to control the room.

Because tech week is such a critical time for designers and technicians, and this

production in particular had a fair number of technical elements, I often felt hesitant to speak up,

which in turn forced me to be selective about when I offered my voice and what I deemed

important enough to say. Because tensions tend to run high, and people are fatigued from

spending hours upon hours in the theatre, I often felt that commanding the attention of the room

during this time was an imposition, and this made it a little intimidating. I have absolutely no

problem running a rehearsal, but tech week offers high stakes and a low margin of error given

the amount of time that we would have to correct a wrong decision. I thought it might be related

to the imposter syndrome that I mentioned earlier in this document, but in retrospect, I have been

through tech processes before as a director, but never before on a show of this scale, and never

with this many people. Directing Woyzeck prepared me for the pace and to some extent the rigor,

in large part because my supervisor took the time to offer me innumerable pointers and

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invaluable support before embarking on the final mile before opening night, but also because the

hands-on approach helps me to retain the things I learn, sometimes admittedly through trial and

error, but ultimately it is through the experience itself that the lessons become palpable for me.

During tech week, due to the fact that there is an enormous amount of work to be done in

an excruciatingly short amount of time, on multiple occasions I found myself needing to make

impossible, zero-hour decisions. Anne Bogart, co-founder of the SITI Company and

internationally esteemed director, likens decision-making to “an act of violence.” (Bogart, 59)

This is a sentiment that I have heard from my supervisor, and have also encountered in reading

Bogart’s work, and it never fails to make me think of the common adage frequently offered to

young writers, which is that you need to ‘kill your darlings,’ and I find this advice to be relevant

if not necessary to directing as well. With that said, I have discovered that it is sometimes

worthwhile and necessary to ‘fight for your darlings,’ because you are the only one that will.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the Herculean efforts of the production’s stage

manager throughout this week, and likewise throughout the rehearsal process. The stage manager

found innovative ways of bridging communications with actors in rehearsal (i.e., developing a

system for tracking the state of the television before the integration of lights and sound using two

folded pieces of card, one longer card with the words ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ written on opposite ends,

and one shorter that toggled between states so that actors could tell at a glance,) and kept all of

the moving parts of the production meticulously organized.

The photographs included at the end of this document were taken by Tim Nguyen for

archival usage (for copyright permission, see Appendix,) and illustrate a cross-section of selected

scenes from the production highlighting the design elements described in this document.

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CHAPTER FIVE: REFLECTION

Toppling the Dominos

A play exists in performance.

Unlike other literary forms, the published text is not the realization of a play text. It is in

this form—though the transcription of the words in a published text—that it achieves any kind of

permanence between performances. In the same way you cannot listen to a piece of sheet music

without some form of musical translation through an instrument, a play in its text form is

incomplete.

The text that we ended up with for Rhinoceros after cuts made sense in theory. It was in

the performance that I was able to identify the successes and failures of the adaptation. It was not

until we mounted the production that I was able to notice moments that I might have added that

would have tied a scene together, or thought of an acting note for a scene that we had struggled

with, or wished I had done any number of things differently.

It is also noteworthy to mention that because of the live element of performance, the

actors had an additional playing partner that they had not worked with before. The audience

tends to act as a unit—or at least the actors will perceive them in this way, i.e., if only a few

people laugh at a joke or a gag, it is considered to be a weak audience response—and the actors

interact with the audience as such. There are, of course, exceptions.

I attended four performances over the course of the run and felt like I experienced a

pretty accurate cross-section of shows. Opening night, for instance, was a complete success from

my perspective: the audience was engaged, engrossed, and receptive from the beginning and the

actors used this to charge their performances . Still, this performance was not without aspects

that I would revisit, i.e., teaching the actors to wait through the audience’s laughter.

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Something that I have noticed about every show I have ever directed, is the pattern of

progression in the performance run. This is not a universal truth as there are too many factors to

claim this as a pervasive and incontestable truth, but it is consistent with my experience: Opening

night and closing night are steeped, respectively, in anticipatory and bitter sweet excitement on

the part of the actors, and have consistently in my experience resulted in polished, engaged, and

connected performances supported by a focus and cohesion not only between the actors onstage,

but between the ensemble as a whole and the audience. As consistently as this has proved true,

the second performance always seems to suffer as a result of the actors feeling confident about

opening night and letting their guard down. This results in performances that are often

disconnected from the ensemble and seem more like ‘going through the paces.’ After the second

night, the show tends to find a balance and hits its stride, but still pales somewhat to the

emotional peaks of opening and closing. This was true of our run of Rhinoceros and has inspired

me to think about ways to combat what I have dubbed the ‘second night slump’ in future

productions. It also piqued my curiosity as to whether or not this was a common effect, if it is

related to working with student actors rather than seasoned professionals, and if it had anything

to do with my directing style that I could augment or adjust. These are questions that I was not

able to answer, but that I take with me forward on my artistic journey.

Likewise, this production has taught me that, with comedies in particular, the audience is

a fickle and unpredictable thing. The actors must form a bond with the audience from the very

first moments, and likewise, a lesson from my supervisor that will stay with me for the rest of my

career is that a director must be particularly conscious of “teaching the audience how to watch

the show” as early as the opening scene. But a group of people do not necessarily act uniformly,

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as if to prove my rejection of the conformist commentary in Rhinoceros, there are always outliers

and unpredictable factors that emerge.

One such example occurred on the second last night of the run, where I experienced

something I have never before as either an actor, director, or spectator. A disorderly and

disruptive couple (who may or may not have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol,)

sitting by themselves in the stage left bank talked audibly amongst themselves for the entire

second half of the performance. The other director in my cohort quietly approached the couple

after twenty-five minutes and politely asked them to stop talking as it was distracting to both the

audience and the performers, and the couple disregarded his attempt at intervention. Contrary to

what one might expect, this did not sully the performance for me, nor did it ruin the night. The

actors’ professionalism and integrity pushing through the scenes and speaking over the loud and

frankly obnoxious chatter was inspiring and humbling. I left the theatre that night glowing with

pride and grateful for their focus.

Handing over the show and watching the performance run unfold felt like pushing the

first domino in a sequence of dominos, in the sense that by that point we had set it up as best we

could and all that was left to do was watch it run its course.

Final Thoughts

Each of the chapter headings are preceded by a “Re-” as if to suggest an initial imagining,

or consideration, or direction; and an afterthought. In part this is to acknowledge the layers that

must be scoured in an unorthodox interpretation like this one. A traditional approach to staging

or understanding this play is still as valid as ever. This play will continue to see productions,

each one broaching different boundaries and grappling with different aspects, and following a

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different through-line. I chose this play for its merits, its potential, and its challenges, and my

decision to stage it in this way should not be seen as a rejection of the source material, but rather

as an investigation of its future staging potential. The world has seen what this play is, and

studied it extensively; I embarked on this journey with the guiding question of what it had the

potential to be. Could it comment on events that had not happened at the time it was written? Is

the text such a product of its time that it cannot be repurposed? How radically can it be

repurposed? And if successful, what are the performance limitations of a dramatic script?

Leading up to the rehearsal process, I changed my mind back and forth maybe a dozen

times as to whether or not to commit to this concept. I debated with myself (and those patient

enough to engage with me) extensively, and found renewed faith in their encouragement, but

there was always a lingering doubt about whether or not this adaptation would stand to scrutiny

and whether it had merit as a production. As with any play that comes with such an extensive

and important history, the thought of shuffling it like a deck of cards felt presumptuous, and it

made me evaluate whether this approach had perhaps not been attempted with this play in the

past because it was either unsupported or unwarranted and that I must be either arrogant or

disillusioned to believe that no one had thought of this before, or else had thought of it and

decided that it was too farfetched to work. In the aftermath, I stand by my decision and defend

the production on the merits of the creative and production teams who commit themselves and

their passion to the project: friends, colleagues, artists, and supervisors alike that emboldened me

to be unapologetic with my imagination, and a handful of honest naysayers that forced me to

(re)evaluate the choice and defend it against early scrutiny that would inevitably lead me to and

prepare me for my defense. To all of these people, I am immeasurably grateful.

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In reflecting on this thesis production with people who did not have the opportunity to

experience it, I find it impossible to say that “I directed Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco…”

without, as an addendum, explaining the contextual shift. In this regard, I am not sure if what I

directed was in fact Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, or if it was too drastic of an adaptation—

too radical a departure from the source text—and therefore something entirely new. Perhaps,

though, it can be both. Directing this production pushed me to my limits, and then forced me to

redefine what my limits were. I think that part of what defines me and the work that I do as an

artist is in this kind of subversion. I am, after all, a storyteller through and through, and trying to

reconcile my love for the classics while making art in the present is an ongoing negotiation that

manifests itself in both my directing and playwriting endeavors. This production challenged me

to revisit my identity, both as an artist and as a person, and examine parts of my heritage that I

had previously taken for granted. What I gained from this production was far more than a deeper

understanding of directing theatre; it was the opportunity to connect two important aspects of my

identity and investigate one via the other in a meaningful and profoundly interconnected way.

The last two years of graduate studies have been tumultuous but in many ways edifying,

validating, and empowering. Something that this time has afforded me is the space to evaluate

my process and my core values with regard to how, why, and for whom I make theatre. As much

as the composition and staging of this piece were created with the audience in mind, the

underlying ideas, the innumerable risks, the subsequent rewards, the small victories, the

shortcomings, and the hard lessons, belong to the artists who banded together to bring this lucid

and irreverent dream to reality. This show was an ambitious undertaking for everyone involved

and I am unbelievably proud of the entire creative and production team for rising to the occasion.

97

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Critical Theory since Plato. 3rd ed., edited by

Adams, Hazard, and Leroy. Searle. Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005, pp1255-8.

BBC News. “Greece Admits Fudging Euro Entry.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4012869.stm. Accessed Monday, 15 November 2004.

Bennett, Michael Y. Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and

Pinter. 1st ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Bennett, Michael Y. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd.

Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Bogart, Anne. A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and the Theatre. Routledge, 2001.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd ed., Random House, 2001.

Ionesco, Eugène. Rhinoceros. Translated by Derek Prouse, Samuel French, 1960.

Ionesco, Eugène, and Donald Watson. The Killer and Other Plays. Grove Press, 1960.

Ionesco, Eugène, and Donald Watson. A Stroll in the Air; Frenzy for Two. John Calder, 1965.

Lane, Nancy. Understanding Eugène Ionesco. University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Penguin Books, 2008.

Wellwarth, George E. “Beyond Realism: Ionesco’s Theory of the Drama.” The Dream and the

Play: Ionesco's Theatrical Quest. Edited by Lazar, Moshe. Undena Publications, 1982,

pp. 33-47.

98

Works Consulted

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. Grove Press, 1958.

Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: a Theory of Production and Reception. Routledge, 1990. Boenisch, Peter M. Directing Scenes and Senses: the Thinking of Regie. Manchester University

Press, 2015.

Carlson, Marvin. Theatre Is More Beautiful than War: German Stage Directing in the Late

Twentieth Century. University of Iowa Press, 2009, pp. 160-80.

Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory Machine. 1st paperback ed.,

University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Council on Foreign Relations. “Greece’s Debt: 1974-2018”.

https://www.cfr.org/timeline/greeces-debt-crisis-timeline. Accessed, 15 November 2018.

Gaensbauer, Deborah B. Eugène Ionesco Revisited. Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Penguin Books, 2015.

Kluback, et al. The Clown in the Agora: Conversations about Eugène Ionesco. P. Lang, 1998.

Lazar, Moshe. “The Psychodramatic Stage: Ionesco and his Doubles.” The Dream and the Play:

Ionesco's Theatrical Quest. Ed. Lazar, Moshe. Undena Publications, 1982, pp. 135-59.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby, Routledge,

2006.

Sidiropoulou, Avra. Authoring Performance: the Director in Contemporary Theatre. 1st ed.,

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Sunstein, Cass R. Why Societies Need Dissent. Harvard University Press, 2003.

99

Fig. 1 The first rhinoceros appears, with ensemble ‘flocking.’ Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 2 The rhinoceroses pass through the square, with ensemble ‘flocking.’ Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Fig. 3 The Logician explains the potential combinations of rhinoceroses. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 4 Daisy reads Kafka, Jean rebukes Bérenger, and Logician tutors Old Gentleman. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Fig. 5 The townspeople console the Housewife on the death of her cat. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 6 The office staircase collapses. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Fig. 7 Jean conceals the rhinoceroses from Bérenger. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 8 Jean’s Transformation. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Fig. 9 Bérenger, Dudard, and Daisy discuss the news on the TV. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 10 Bérenger watches Mr. Papillion protesting on TV.

Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Fig. 11 The rhinoceroses dance a traditional Καλαµατιανό. Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

Fig. 12 The rhinoceroses offer Bérenger kinship.

Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photo, 2018

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Appendix

From: Tim Nguyen <tim@citrusphoto.ca> Subject: Re: Rhinoceros Photographs. Date: May 6, 2019 at 2:22:12 PM MDT To: Constantine Anastasakis <c.x.anastas@gmail.com> Cc: Tim Nguyen <tim@citrusphotography.ca> Hi Constantine, Please accept this email as my absolute permission that you may include any number of images taken by me, Tim Nguyen O/A Citrus Photo, of the production of Rhinoceros in your thesis submission. Regards, Tim Nguyen tim@citrusphoto.ca www.citrusphoto.ca