New Play on Broadway

Rhinoceros (translated from the French of Eugene lonesco by Derek Prouse) finally breached Broadway's avant-guarded walls for France's perkiest avant-gardist. The play, to be sure, has been trumpeted enough: its history included Paris and London productions with Jean-Louis Barrault and Laurence Olivier; its story dealt with people becoming rhinoceroses. If, for all that, it isn't a real Broadway event, it has its virtues as an oddity.

Often taxed with being woefully--and willfully--obscure, Playwright lonesco in Rhinoceros is by curtain time all too obvious. To the most insistent of modern-day themes, conformity, he brings the most extravagant of illustrations: that, mass-pressured enough, people will even be rhinoceroses. What starts in a provincial French town as hysteria over a rhino running loose, ends as everybody's hysteria to become one. Logicians are as eager as businessmen, leftists as logicians; at the end just one fuddled clerk (attractively played by Eli Wallach) remains human. And even he vows not to capitulate only after ruefully condemning his appearance--"A smooth brow looks so ugly, I need one or two horns"--and after regretting that he hadn't joined the others "while there was still time."

lonesco's giving conformity a rhinoceros-hiding is a bold bit of symbolism and a funny thought for satire. But what is funny about rhinoceroses is to the same degree farfetched; lonesco's satire never proves very expressive or illuminating; men turn into rhinoceroses without turning into anything more, without, in fact, ever being heard of again. If the only point is that people will become absolutely anything, so long as it runs in herds, Rhinoceros is far too long in making its point. Actually the play is much better farce than satire. The pandemonium of the first rhinoceros scares, the hurly-burly of the mounting rhinoceros fever, the sight of Actor Zero Mostel virtually turning into a rhinoceros right onstage, are all good knockabout fun. And the dialogue throws darts into a variety of human rationalizations and cliches.

In building a baby-walrus idea to rhinoceros proportions, the play fills up with flabby incident, labored joking, repetitious tricks; and the final scene has neither horror nor pathos enough. But Rhinoceros gives Broadway a breath of exhilarating insanity during a too-often imbecile season.

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