Rhinoceros

What the Adams House production of Rhinoceros will be like when the actors have memorized more of the lines I do not know. What the play is now is funny, very funny, in the outrageously sloppy manner of ginned-up genius.

The assumption behind director Alan King's effort is that Ionesco is a fuddy-duddy playwright. True, his Rhinoceros sketches the transformation of all humans, save one, into grumpy beasts, but then readers of daily newspapers have long predicted such things. Besides, Ionesco calls for realistic sets and the stale old division of a play into acts and scenes.

So out with realistic sets. William Schroeder has designed a complex series of small platforms which start off as a standard stage, then are stacked to form one tier and then two. As the stage gets higher it gets smaller, and the play ends with the last man on earth pacing on a tiny square, rubbing his head against the ceiling of the Adams House Dining room. This is the most comically un-Faustian act since the nose tweek.

Behind the tiers are a series of painted flats which definitely need reinforcement. During the last act they were almost battered down. More important, something should be done about the poster-paint job on the flats which cries "High School" as force-fully as any college sweatshirt.

It takes about ten minutes of carpentry to put each tier in place. The time is used as a quasi-intermission: the play isn't really going on, but there are high-jinks on stage. A movie of rhinoceroses in motion was projected against a flat accompanied by a medley of Elvis Presley songs; another time animal cookies were distributed to the audience. Mine was a bit tart, but eating it, I confess, was the highest synaesthetic joy.

The sets also helped solve problems with blocking. If a character had to exit, he often just fell off the stage.

After a few more shows the cast may have settled on lines and cues which will undoubtedly affect individual performances. As things are now, David Odell is perfect as Berenger, the stoop-shouldered milksop supreme who stands alone against the herd. He is just the right amount of pot-bellied and high voiced; he shuffles without shame and is steeped in the divine oblivion of the truly noble and the godawful stupid.

Alan Richards is far too surly and petulant to make Jean, Berenger's fop friend, as funny as he should be in the opening scenes. It may be that this petulance is the only way to make Berenger's lines work as well as they do, but I'm not convinced it is. Then, too, a good portion of Jean's badinage was lost in the cafe scene because it was never made clear to the audience that his remarks were meant to apply to a conversation at the next table and vice versa.

The men in Berenger's office make a fair accounting for themselves -- no more. Buddy Mear as Papillon does a nice job of caricaturing The Boss, Peter Wirth as the sceptic Botard gets too loud too fast, Richard Petkun as Dudar, the office commer, has no poise whatsoever.

There is too much burlesquing by the women in the play, but as they do it well it isn't fair to carp. Denise Girouard as Mrs. Boef, wife of a rhinoceros, is the most skillful of the lot. She is a master of the tableau vivant, always finding the right arch of leg or arm to drag comedy out of stage direction. Sara Salisbury plays Daisy, the secretary in Berenger's office, and she looks like a secretary, which is some achievement in Cambridge. Miss Salisbury has the good sense not to overdo her girlishness and pucker-pout.

The sound effects, chiefly rock and roll and assorted grunts, are handled clumsily. The lighting is barbarously simple, which can be expected in a House production, but it lets be seen what good there is to see: Ionesco scintillating, Odell acting and the whole set growing.