The New Yiddish Rep in association with the Castillo Theatre

The conscious effort to mainstream the alt-right movement in the Trump era has, of course, troubled many Americans deeply. So it’s understandable that New Yiddish Rep would want to stage Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (at the Castillo Theatre in Manhattan) just now. Although first performed in 1959, the play—about a society in which hordes of humans morph into rhinoceroses—has traditionally been viewed as an analogy for the rise of fascism in Europe in the years preceding World War II. An argument can be made that the French-language play comments in a more general way on the human tendency to conform. But European audiences (and Parisian audiences in particular) would have had Hitler and Mussolini on their minds when watching this drama’s premiere nearly 60 years ago. In this new staging, which uses the new Yiddish translation of the play, by Eli Rosen (accompanied by English supertitles), there is a late scene in which one character goes rhino and is seen goose-stepping and, finally, giving a Nazi salute. So, clearly, we know what director Moshe Yassur was aiming for. (At another point, one of the supertitles uses the term “fake news.”) Ionesco’s scenario focuses …Read more