RHINOCEROS
By Eugene Ionesco
Directed by Cosmin Chivu
Choreography Winona Sorensen
Set Design St. John Frizell
Costumes Dena Verdesca
Lighting Design Hideaki Tsutsui
Executive Producer Liza Garcia
With: Fabio Cardoso, Kevin McKelvy, Paula Jeanine Potocki, Jennifer Malloy, Paul Fidalgo, Laura Rikard, Shenica-Rochelle Odom, Josh Anthony Iacovelli, Jim Thalman, Winona Sorensen, Nick Bixby, Rock Kohli, Philip Williams.
Rhinoceros was produced in July 2001 by the InterArt Group. The play was selected as part of the Midtown International Theater Festival, which was hosted by The New 42nd Street Theater in Manhattan.
Rhinoceros is an important work, a play both enlightening and entertaining. (Ken Jaworowski, OOBR)
 The message of this play is applicable to the world today and the human condition indefinitely. The theme, politically, is endlessly reintroduced into society. The beginning of the new millennium is not immune to the effects and dangers of conformation. We are at the beginning of a volatile time, a time when society is pressured to take sides. Government becomes increasingly threatening, attempting to infuse the public with a false nationalism. This kind of fanaticism can turn violent and Rhinoceros deals with the conformity that occurs in times like these. This play is our reality.
Despite the fact that Rhinoceros is considered and sometimes staged as a light comedy, I’ll rather say the play represents a brutal metaphor for what happened in Romania under fascism and communism. In 1940 Ionesco wrote: "The police are rhinoceroses. The judges are rhinoceroses. You are the only man among the rhinoceroses. The rhinoceroses wonder how the world could have been led by men. You yourself wonder: Is it true that the world was led by men?" .
I don’t think I’m saying nothing new when I declare that I’m afraid of the people who want to save the world. The savers of the humanity were the ones who established the Inquisition, the concentration camps, they builted the crematories, and the tiranic systems. I think that in our time, as always, religions and ideologies are only masks and excuses of the destroyer instinct, the desire of killing , the deep hatred of the human being to human being. We kill in the name of God, in the name of country, to balance the world, for the sanity of the humanity, in the name of love and social justice. After over 45 years since the play was written, we all can see the universal modern man always in hurry, he doesn’t have time, is not looking left or right, and is walking straight ahead like a robot. This is an every day image in all the big cities in the world. Today, as 60 years ago, the concerned and restless man, running towards a mirage, can change very easily into collective psychosis. The rhinoceritis, with all its forms of manifestation, represents threatening against the people who lost the sense and taste of their individuality. Because the solitude it is not separation but meditation. The play is celebrating the human being, as the highest existential form and of manifestation in the Universe.
   
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