Giamatti and Turturo in “Rhinoceros.” Photo by Hawver and Hall.

Presented by American Repertory Theater
By Eugene Ionesco
Translated by Derek Prouse
Directed by Diane Paulus

Aug. 14 – Sept. 27, 2026
Loeb Drama Center

Digital Playbill

Critique by Kitty Drexel

Runtime: Two hours, including one fifteen-minute intermission.

TLDR; Famous people on stage! Timely politics on stage! Vote the rhinoceri out.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Boston’s arts journalism is awash with news about the American Repertory Theatre’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Rightly so, it’s a grand production worthy of its hype. Director Paulus is finally meeting a political moment as it occurs. She’s invited a grand, New York- and L.A.-based cast to play in Cambridge, MA. (Hello, Bostonian understudies! I appreciate you.) Ionesco’s plays lack universal appeal. Thanks to Derek Prouse’s translation, this charismatic production comes as close as one might get. 

Ionesco’s Rhinoceros dwells under the umbrella of the dramatist movement, the Theatre of the Absurd. TOTA, a 1950s & 1960s American and European theatre movement based on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), posits the nihilistic/absurdist/existentialist belief that human existence is without meaning or purpose. Rather than do as Camus suggested, which was to find joy in the absurdity, playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco (the Romanian Beckett), Jean Genet (the French Ionesco), and Harold Pinter (the British Genet) decided to be depressed. 

Thanks, Reddit.

Whether because of their depression or otherwise, the absurdists’ absurd plays tossed out their days’ traditional theatre structures and disregarded performance precedents. Their plays’ characters were unconventionally anxious and remained dramatically unresolved through the end of the play. The playwrights philosophized to their audiences: if life has no meaning, then humanity has no direction.    

Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is like an anti-Waiting for Godot. Spoiler alert: In Beckett’s 1952 play, Godot infamously never arrives despite Vladimir and Estragon’s waiting. In Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, despite generations of illicit Asiatic and African poaching trades decimating their populations, a rhinoceros disrupts a provincial town in France within minutes of the first scene. It’s a placid Sunday morning. Jean (Paul Giamatti) and Berenger (John Turturro) are enjoying a friendly glass of wine served by a perky waiter (Clay Singer) at a cafe. A grocer (Peter Francis James) and his wife (Kristine Nielsen) run their business while a Housewife (Harriet D. Foy, who is shamefully underutilized in this production) takes her cat for a walk. 

The first rhinoceros arrives, and the townsfolk are appalled. Daisy (Broadway, off-Broadway actress and T.V. and film chameleon Tatiana Maslany), as in a young woman as fresh as a daisy, rises to the occasion to assert the legitimacy of the rhino’s appearance and to calm the townsfolk. Her selflessness is so modest and self-sacrificing that all the men around her fall in love (much to her chagrin). 

No one has seen a rhinoceros in this town in years, the townsfolk cry. They doubt whether a rhinoceros was seen. Not in their town. Not when rhinoceroses have been banned since childhood. People exaggerate, after all. The witnesses must be mistaken. Yet, over three acts and a great range of ridiculous human behaviors, the townsfolk come to realize that a rhinoceros did rampage through their town. In fact, rhinoceri are showing up everywhere: workplaces, schools, homes, even the church! The rhinos will keep showing up until someone does something about it. 

It should be obvious to nearly anyone with a basic understanding of WWII politics and an internet connection that Rhinoceros is not really about a misplaced odd-toed ungulate. Rhinoceros allegorizes an isolated society’s fight against the inescapable lure of group thought from an insider’s perspective. One could easily replace Ionesco’s rhinoceros with another propagandized group thought event, and audiences would still resonate with it: christian nationalism, wokeism, the Marines, LulaRoe, patriarchy, feminism, A.I. in schools, the internet, ‘Bama Rush culture, incel culture, Beatlemania, Antivaxxers, the malicious scourge known as culottes, etc. 

Yes, Ionesco’s pachyderm metaphor could represent any historical movement, but in the A.R.T.’s production, per Ionesco’s intention, the rhinoceros represents totalitarianism, fascism, and authoritarianism. Ionesco wrote it after WWII in response to Hitler and his failed Nazi experiment. It’s the very political group a certain pedophilic oligarch shit-staining the Epstein Files and his wimpy crony cucks lionize. And Paulus chose this play because it directly reflects the absurdism playing out in the U.S.’s political theatre today. Ionesco’s play shows and tells us it’s not a matter of if an individual conforms to societal pressure, but when. Theatre of the Absurd, indeed. 

Equally as absurd, at least to this critic, was the audience’s response to two of the play’s stars, Giamatti and Turturro, and not its third, Maslany. Giamatti and Turturro, excellent actors who deserve praise for their work in this production, received applause upon making their first entrance. They hadn’t done anything except arrive at their mark on time. Boomers, y’all know they’re supposed to do that, right? Clapping at an actor’s first moment onstage is as absurd as clapping after a plane landing. It’s their job. Their characters’ motivation is the actor’s paycheck received at intermission. Please wait until the end. 

Meanwhile, Maslany may have a shorter career, but only because she is decades younger than her costars. Give her time. She’ll catch up. The kids in the audience, who didn’t clap along with their parents and grandparents, are, as they say, alright. 

While we’re discussing the talents of Giamatti and Turturro, they perform beautifully together. The two have such sympathetic stage chemistry as arguing friends that they could be brothers. In a key Act Two scene, Turturro assists Giamatti’s unbridled physical comedy through a violent transformation. Berenger takes to Jean’s bedside; Jean becomes violently immodest upon the person of Berenger as the scene unfolds. In this play, Berenger (Turturro) and Jean (Giamatti) are loyal friends. In another world, they could be lovers. 

Fake news: Maslany and Turturro. Photo by Hawver and Hall.

Rhinoceros truly becomes a work of absurdist theatre when Ionesco shows us kind, intelligent Daisy who has a bright future ahead of her picking drunk, slovenly, spiritually and fiscally impoverished Berenger as her romantic partner. He has nothing to offer her except an ouroboros of poverty and alcoholism. While we can see Turturro’s huggably muscular arms from the nosebleeds, we cannot in good faith believe Beringer is as devoted to hitting the gym as Turturro. Maslany fights for her life and our suspension of disbelief through these moments. She is as believably charming then as she is throughout the play. But surely solitude is preferable to Daisy than the horrors awaiting her in a marriage to Berenger. 

Apropos of nothing: Kristine Nielsen steals her scene with Maslany, Turturro, and the male ensemble with spotless comedic timing and hyperbolic vocal range as Mrs. Boef. We watch her character choose fascism before our very eyes, and it is hilarious. 

We would be remiss if we failed to mention the sound design of Fitz Patton. Patton’s work gives presence to the production’s rhinoceri. We cannot see them, but we hear them. Their grunts and trumpet calls echo through the Loeb as the smoke effects of Markus Maurette cloud the stage. Patton and Maurette evoke the essence of a rhinoceros and effectively support the play’s story. 

If Ionesco’s predictions are to be believed, by watching Rhinoceros we’re watching history repeat itself onstage. Fortunately for us, all North Americans have currently retained the right to vote. Massachusetts holds its state primaries on September 1. The federal criminal convicted of rape and his balding, low-testosterone simps may currently be in the White House, but they won’t be there forever. VOTE. It’s time to take our rhinoceri out to pasture. 

Here’s the Massachusetts election website again: https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/elections/recent-updates/upcoming-elections.htm

VOTE.    

UPDATE 8/24/26: A previous version of this article misspelled the character Berenger’s name. It has been updated.

(Rosalía’s “Berghain” briefly plays during a stunning Act One scene change. Both are stunning works of art. Rosalía for her depiction of Hildegard von Bingen in a German techno club. Paulus for maintaining the play’s charged dramatic energy through a routine scene change.)

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