Rhinos on the march

At times, political movements have terrified, and resisting them required courage.

That's just one - and perhaps the most concrete - takeaway from Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's wild, disturbing production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros.

The Romanian-born Ionesco wrote his classic of absurdist theater in 1959; Europe was still recovering from the horrific mass movements called Nazism and fascism, and the post-WWII surge of the Communist Party in the playwright's adopted country of France had catapulted it to the forefront of politics there.

In Rhinoceros, as friends Berenger and Jean argue over some minor matter near the village square, their escalating fray is interrupted when a rhinoceros tears across the square. Then another appears, and gradually almost all the villagers, layabouts and good citizens alike, are transformed by an epidemic of "rhinoceritis" and become rampaging beasts, wrecking buildings, trampling animals, ruining the economy.

Maria Shaplin's lighting, Tina Brock's eerie sound design, and Lisa Glover's rhinoceros masks capture, in Twilight Zone style, the sheer terror of conformity, of watching friends, families, whole towns swallowed up by a movement. At times, Brock's direction accelerates the pace too quickly, rushing through three acts in 100 intermissionless minutes. But she grasps the humor and the horror; this play will captivate, rivet, frighten, and confuse.

Ionesco touches on some recurring themes from his other works: anxiety, the equivalence of logic and morality, isolation, despair, and indoctrination assured by violence. As the everyman Berenger (a recurring Ionesco character), Ethan Lipkin generates sympathy for his confused, outsider status; a nonconformist mostly by inertia and habit, he is left outside of social movements, and yet, unwillingly, is most affected by them.

Berenger, who resists, and his friend Jean (a fantastic performance by David Stanger), who succumbs, provide a personal reflection of the damage wrought by mass movements.

If it sounds hard to comprehend, perhaps that's the play's indictment of the current climate. Politics once could create a cold civil war, dividing families, wrecking friendships, pitting groups in fierce battles that flooded public squares. Participation used to require more than unfriending "dissidents," posting on Tumblr, or complaining on Reddit. And resistance? A bit more muster than that.