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.
