Jawnts: Staging of a political play
Fringe season is upon us. For those who don't know: It's a sprawling festival devoted to innovative performance and modeled on an even more epic version in Edinburgh.
Fringe season is upon us. For those who don't know: It's a sprawling festival devoted to innovative performance and modeled on an even more epic version in Edinburgh.
The performances are divided into "presented" productions, which generally enjoy the full weight of the festival's apparatus (including funds). Then there are "neighborhood" performances, which tend to be undertaken by locals who pay $350 to be included in the glossy catalog and for some light administrative support.
This year the presented side of Fringe is smaller than ever and offers relatively few local shows. But Philadelphia stalwarts Pig Iron Theater Company and New Paradise Laboratories are both offering typically engrossing affairs. The latter's long-developed The Adults offers a riff on a fractious, booze-drenched vacation. The action is informed by Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and the slightly grotesque oceanside paintings of Eric Fischl.
Fringe's neighborhood offerings are too numerous to be recounted, but the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's rendition of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros is worth a look.
The two-hour play is a bit of a mixed bag. It contains a lot of fatiguing shouting in its middle section and feels a bit overlong as a result. The cast is mostly good and Ethan Lipkin shines as Ionesco's multiplay leading man Berenger, here a charmingly oafish town drunk. The set is great but the costumes are even better, especially the rhinoceros outfits that become more commonplace as the story unfolds.
The play is set in a provincial French town that is suddenly beset by marauding rhinoceri. It soon becomes evident that the townspeople are transforming themselves into the beasts, a trend that accelerates as more adherents join the movement. Unlike Ionesco's famous Bald Soprano - which is basically absurdist gibberish - Rhinoceros is a clear political parable for the allure of fascism and other powerful authoritarian movements.
Rhinoceros is based on Ionesco's teenage years in 1930s Romania. As he told Paris Review in the 1980s, "Everyone was becoming pro-Nazi - writers, teachers, biologists, historians. . . . The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?"
At this year's Fringe, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium takes up that very question.
Jawnts: RHINOCEROS
Adrienne,
2030 Sansom St.,
3d floor.
From Sept. 7-21.
Tickets are $15
to $25 and most shows start
at 7:30 p.m.
http://fringearts.com/event/eugene-ionescos-rhinoceros-18/
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