Rhino Apocalypse Comes to Stetson’s Second Stage Theatre

Listen to Anders Hammerstrom talk about Berenger, his lead role in Stetson Theatre Arts’ latest Second Stage Theatre production, and he sounds . . . well, absurd.

“I was trying to make Berenger seem like a real human being for a long time, with all of his thoughts flowing into each other,” said Hammerstrom, a sophomore theatre major. “In a normal play, that’s how you’d do it.”

Berenger (played by Anders Hammerstrom) and Daisy (Monika Lamud) face the onslaught of the rhinoceros apocalypse in Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist comedy “Rhinoceros,” which runs Feb. 23-26. Photos by Ken McCoy.

But “Rhinoceros,” which runs Thursday through Sunday, Feb. 23-26, at the theatre venue inside the Museum of Art – DeLand, is no normal play.

Rather, the 1959 work by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco is “a classic of the theatre of the absurd,” said director and Stetson theatre arts professor Ken McCoy. “I like to explain it to people as going from quaint, little storybook France and ending up with the zombie apocalypse.”

Or, McCoy alternately said, “ ‘Rhinoceros’ is like ‘Amelie’ (a romantic movie about a quirky, altruistic Parisian waitress) meets ‘Shawn of the Dead’ (a British horror flick that plays the zombie theme for laughs).”

Only the zombies in Ionesco’s play are, well, rhinoceroses. Rather, they were once humans who have inexplicably metamorphosed into rhinos. The phenomenon keeps happening until Berenger is one of the few humans remaining, and he’s left pondering his sanity and the ramifications of literally following the herd.

“When I initially read the play, it was so dramatic to me, so epic,” Hammerstrom said. “I read this like a dramatic hero like Hamlet. I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s the last man.’ But it’s mainly comedic. So I had to do that more.

Berenger (played by Anders Hammerstrom, bottom) watches his best friend, Jean (Vasili Loparnos), turn into a rhinoceros in “Rhinoceros.”

“Berenger has a relationship with a character named Daisy (played by Hammerstrom’s real-life girlfriend, Monika Lamud). Their relationship is like a whole married life in a couple of hours. So if you progress naturally it just wouldn’t work. The play is pretty difficult because of the absurdist nature of it.”

Yet the play has a serious, even dark underbelly. According to theatrehistory.com, “ ‘Rhinoceros’ demonstrates the playwright’s anxiety about the spread of inhuman totalitarian tendencies in society. Inspired by Ionesco’s personal experiences with fascism during World War II, this absurdist drama depicts the struggle of one man to maintain his identity and integrity alone in a world where all others have succumbed to the ‘beauty’ of brute force and violence.”

“Ionesco went through and revised his diaries after ‘Rhinoceros’ had been published,” McCoy noted, adding that the playwright had dual citizenship in Romania and France. “In those diaries he highlighted some moments where he mentioned people ‘turning into rhinoceroses’ in the 1940s as he was dodging the Nazis.”

“Berenger is pretty much the last sane man in an insane world,” Hammerstrom said. “He represents Ionesco and his experiences with the Nazis and watching everything around him changing.”

Rhinoceros play by Stetson Theatre Arts
The last three humans on earth are serenaded by rhinoceroses in “Rhinoceros.” The cast includes, left to right: Monika Lamud, Anders Hammerstrom and Joe Sarracino.

The play, McCoy added, “is commonly accepted to be an extended metaphor of what it’s like for a person who does not join the crowd, who does not go with the trend, and their experience and sort of horror at seeing people they know as warm human beings suddenly becoming something else.”

Teju Cole, writing in the New York Times Magazine on Nov. 11, 2016 – yes, just a few days after the presidential election – alluded extensively to “Rhinoceros” as he warily examined the emerging zeitgeist in the United States.

“Ionesco wanted to know why so many people give in to these poisonous ideologies,” Cole wrote. “How could so many get it so wrong? The play, an absurd farce, was one way he grappled with this problem.”

Though Stetson’s production was scheduled long before the election, does McCoy believe the election of Donald Trump as president will affect how theater-goers perceive Ionesco’s work?

“You never know how people are going to take it, and we’re not making any specific allusions to that other than the very quick tendency of people to jump on the bandwagon,” McCoy said. “Can I call it the hate bandwagon? It’s that tendency to blame others for their problems and to seek solutions that involve violence. So you can see the play as anti-war or even anti-hate speech — people giving up values that we consider to be more human and more understanding and instead going for group-think. You see it from the position of the guy who tries to stay human through it all.”

However, McCoy adds: “It is a comedy. It’s very funny throughout, and it’s easy to appreciate it just on that level.”

To bring the rhino apocalypse to life and portray the metamorphosis of humans into rampaging beasts, the Stetson production will utilize an extensive multi-media approach, McCoy said. Those techniques will include digital animations and projections as well as sound design that uses live reinforcement and voice alteration.

The cast of “Rhinoceros” also includes Vasili Loparnos, Joseph Sarracino, Griff Vari, Christian Christensen, Jaycie Cohen, Athena Gonzalez, Josie Koeppel, Emma Bjornsen, Gale Chapman and Elijah McCoy.

 

If You Go

Stetson Theatre Arts’ Second Stage Theatre will present “Rhinoceros” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, through Saturday, Feb. 25, and at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26. Performances will be in the theatre at the Museum of Art – DeLand, 600 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand.

Admission is $12 adults; $10 senior citizens and students; free for Stetson students, faculty and staff with valid ID. Tickets will be available at the door and reserved tickets must be picked up 30 minutes prior to the start of the show. Box office opens one hour prior to curtain. For information or reservations, call 386-822-8700.

– Rick de Yampert