Théâtre de la Ville Arrives in Los Angeles with Rhinoceros



Photo: ©Jean-Louis Fernandez

"The return of international theater at UCLA? Hallelujah!"

--Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times, Fall Arts Preview                                     



This week, Théâtre de la Ville brings their American premiere tour of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist classic, Rhinoceros, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, to launch the 2012-2013 season of CAP UCLA. Featured as a critic's pick in the Fall Arts Preview of The Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty describes the play as, "a bracing comic demonstration of the perils of conformity." Commenting on the production's premiere in Paris, Michel Cournot of Le Monde noted:

The staging of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota is a masterpiece. The play is certainly not simple, but with him everything is clear, everything in a single stroke. It is as if we were in the very souls rather than looking from outside.… There is a magic embrace between the show and the spectator.

Now, this definitive production visits the US for a highly limited run of just eleven performances in four of America's leading venues. David Eden Productions is proud to bring this landmark tour to:

Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) on September 21 and 22

Cal Performances at University of California, Berkeley on September 27, 28, and 29
University Musical Society (UMS) in Ann Arbor on October 11, 12, and 13

Additional performances will be presented in Brooklyn, New York by BAM on October 4, 5, and 6.

In advance of the tour, director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota made time in his busy schedule as director of both Théâtre de la Ville and the Festival d'Automne à Paris to offer some insight to www.classicaltv.com:

Firstly, I hope the play’s audience will thoroughly enjoy the performance of Rhinoceros, because it is both a tragic and comic allegory that intertwines several levels of feelings, languages, impressions and interpretations. A mixture of genres that ranges from the Marx Brothers to Kafka. I also hope that the audience will enjoy discovering or rediscovering this text and this author through the work of the group of actors that have been working with me for many years. Together, we have sought to make a theater of pleasure, which would be neither bleak nor desperate, and that embraces from a dialectic perspective man’s cowardice and conformism as well as his hypocrisy. A theater that casts an acute look on the world and the individual, but decidedly retains the power of inventive fantasy and freedom.

Whereas it is to say if today’s world is bleaker than that of 1959… We all know that history is always “full of sound and fury,” to quote Shakespeare. One always moves ahead ridding ourselves of crimes and monstrosities, and one always breathes more lightly when a sudden unexpected event happens to convince us that mankind still has much progress to make. Moreover, as history moves ahead, some things are gained, others lost, and one does not always know what is lost and what is gained. We could nonetheless do with a little joy from time to time. This is also a good reason for us to do theater.

Here are some of Demarcy-Mota's additional observations, in French, from the recent documentary film, Eugène Ionesco, quoi de neuf?: 

Follow @DEP_News on Twitter to keep tabs on this tour, and bookmark artseden.blogspot.com.