In a groundbreaking theatrical venture designed to be not only the first but also the last of its kind, a Mclean, Va.-based theatre company called the Thule Society plans a summer staging of Eugène Ionesco’s unsettling anti-fascist allegory Rhinoceros, but with a radical 360-degree perspective that will cast the play in a stark new light. With ambitious plans to occupy public parks, restaurants, grocery stories, and big-box establishments in all 50 states, Thule’s immersive production will lend an immediacy and realism to the escalating social devastation delineated in Ionesco’s 1959 classic.
“We want to give viewers a visceral experience of the upheaval and chaos that Ionesco so presciently imagined,” said director and Thule founder Oliver Revilo. “More importantly, we want to recreate a real-time sense of the public passivity and conformity that allows such mayhem to spread unchecked.”
Ionesco’s play depicts the inexorable descent of a provincial French town into senseless mass psychosis, as its inhabitants gradually turn into rampaging rhinoceroses laying waste to the town, spurring the local intellectuals to argue exhaustingly among themselves about whether this mass metamorphosis is happening at all, and, if so, how best to address it. In the end, all but one lonely, doubtful man, Bérenger, faces the threat by succumbing to it. Casting has not begun for the difficult central role, but, said Revilo with some satisfaction, “The parts of the ineffectual resistance will be all too easy to cast.”
While previous stagings of Rhinoceros have taken different approaches to depicting the offstage violence wrought by the play’s stampeding animals, Revilo said that Thule’s production will call for the wrangling of dozens of actual rhinoceroses for maximum verisimilitude, as well as elaborate makeup and prosthetics for performers in various states of transformation.
“We want no barrier between the audience and the reality of the play’s harsh, clarifying violence,” said Revilo. “In fact, the ideal audiences for this Rhinoceros will be unsuspecting viewers who encounter the show in the course of their daily lives and are genuinely shaken by it.”
The logistics of mounting a play simultaneously in hundreds of American cities and small towns don’t seem to daunt Revilo or his relatively new Thule company, whose last production was a revival of Hans Rehberg’s seldom-seen play The Wolves. Revilo pointed to the strong ties his company has built with agencies across the federal government, including in the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the U.S. Digital Service. He also alluded to a newly welcoming atmosphere on college campuses, another category of location Thule hopes to bring their Rhinoceros staging in due course.
In related news, the Kennedy Center today announced that Thule will be the performing arts institution’s resident theatre production company.
