It

is ironic that within one generation after the awful state systems that quashed individuals worldwide was defeated in joy and relegated to the ash heap of history, freethinking is again in danger. Post-modernism has called it irrelevant or misguided, a throwback to the Enlightenment and nothing more. Orthodoxies of any persuasion condemn it to hellfire, globalism exploits it for economic gain, and consumerism has packaged it and sent it down conveniently monitored channels on the web. Theocracies are in vogue; the idea of a national character is again popular, text-book and arbitrary races created by the most reactionary elements worldwide are robbing people of the fact that the only race we belong to, the Human Race, (even in the face of empirical evidence proving the human family is a fact) is nothing but romantically inspired, liberal spin. Ionesco gives us an oasis in Rhinoceros, a manifesto for the Individual. At the time he wrote this piece in 1960, Marxism was the darling of western progressives, who turned a blind eye to the excesses of a system that would disallow them the very discourse that they enjoyed in their own countries. Within ten years, from the time between writing Bald Soprano to Rhinoceros, Ionesco had turned from enfant terrible of the avant-garde to the hackneyed purveyor of the status quo and enemy to the working class!

 By Ionescos own admission, Rhinoceros came to him in a dream, which he wrote into a short story and soon after a play. It is a study in Fascism, under which Ionesco first encountered in his native Romania and then later under the Vichy government in France, when in 1942 he immigrated to live in Marseilles. He was witness to the great fire in the old city perpetrated by the Gestapo and their French lackeys, the Milice franaise. The play is an extended metaphor, perhaps allegorical, that should be read as a cautionary tale. Ionescos Rhinoceros forces us to consider that there can never be ideological systems or political movements that can minister to the pliability of humankind, the spuriousness of our characters and gloriously chaotic existence that makes us human. The play asserts that there were never any millenarian movements that can rescue us from having to deal with life on a moment-to-moment basis. Ionesco is telling us that all Ethics are situational because people develop in innumerable and infinite ways, and for that reason the Individual trumps all religious, ethical or ideological systems. We are forced to take people on a one-to-one basis-- we must accept that challenge, lest we forfeit our humanity. Enjoy our play. Special Thanks to: Jeff Quin Dorset Noble Estela Vroncovich