One’s mind can easily wander wondering what the rhinos mean.
In Ionesco’s 1950 absurdist dark comedy, Rhinocéros, set in a small French town, the titular pachyderms start showing up and stampeding about, first one then another, eventually becoming a thundering herd. The townsfolk are terrified yet fascinated, and one by one they succumb to group-think and turn into rhinos themselves. When written, the play was an allegory about gullibility to Fascism and Nazism before and during World War II. Pointless Theatre has just opened an intermittently diverting production of it with a new translation and direction by Frank Labovitz, and the experience of watching it prompts a provocative question: Just who are the rhinoceroses of today?
There’s plenty of time during the play to muse on that. Ionesco’s script is structured around multiple topics in a series of less-than-scintillating scenes separated by extremely loud and arresting incidents of rhino invasion — signaled in the Pointless production by eyepopping lighting (Hailey Laroe), pounding sound (Aj Johnson), and ingenious puppets (Jess Rassp). The rhino interludes are done so fun one looks forward to them. The rhino sound design alone is so artful — earth-shaking stomps, impact crashes, trumpeting and roaring, horns and even a sax — that it almost becomes another character. And the masked rhino ensemble sequence at the top of Act Two is a reward worth returning from intermission for.
Following a lovely pre-show soundtrack of Edith Piaf, the first scene is set in a quaint French café (designed by James Raymond), peopled by patrons, passersby, and staff in colorful cartoonlike costumes (Kitt Crescenzo). Here we meet the play’s main character, a man named Berenger (Mary Myers). He’s joined by his snide friend Jean (James Raymond), who berates Beringer for being disheveled,…