Rhinoceros: Parish Players’ Production to Open in New Space

Rhinoceros is a “. . . surreal, and slyly humorous play about the ways that ideas can mutate and become monstrous,” and the latest production by The Parish Players. It opens on Friday, September 13 (not the 12th as originally planned) at a new venue, the 1930s-era EAST THETFORD PAVILION. The building is next to Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford and has been used through the years as a local dancehall.

Why Rhinoceros? Kate Willard, the show’s director, was feeling up for a challenge, and staging the absurdist play by Eugene Ionesco fit the bill. For one thing, she is fluent in French, which means she could access the work in its original language. In fact, she recently returned to the Upper Valley after getting a master’s degree in movement and theatre at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in France. She listed a few of the things that intrigued her about directing the play:

As someone with a background in highly physical theatre and with a passion for puppetry, I was eager to grapple with the theatrical problems posed by a play like Rhinoceros. How do you transform someone into a rhinoceros onstage? How do you make the audience feel like a crash of rhinos are running around in town, without just letting the words tell the audience? How do you conjure the extreme loneliness and disconnection of the last person left alive in what is essentially an apocalypse, and yet still treat the show with humor? 

Kate is relatively new to The Parish Players, though she quickly became co-chair of the theater’s Board, and has found it to be a welcoming place, where “anyone with a solid plan will be given support and space to make art.” At 27, she is among a number of younger artists who have joined the almost 60-year old community theatre troupe. Asked to comment on the influx of young people into an established group of “stalwarts” (not my word but I like it), she said Rhinoceros has several teens and artists in their 20s and 30s, but still reflects a range of ages. “With a cast of 16, our youngest member is 14, and our oldest is 74.”  

The change of venue from the usual—Thetford’s Eclipse Grange Theater—to the East Thetford Pavilion was deliberate and integral to this particular play, not unlike, perhaps, a site-specific work of sculpture. Says Kate about her choice: “This play about a small, rural French community needed a space that would anchor it in a small, rural town in Vermont. My hope is that walking past cornfields before entering a room so integrated into the life and history of Thetford will remind audiences that rhinocerization could take hold here in 2024 just as easily as it did in Europe in the 1930s.”

Performance Dates:

Friday, and Saturday, September 13–14 and 19–21 at 7:00 p.m. Matinees on Sundays, September 15 and 22 at 2:30 p.m.

Tickets: Reserve by phone at (802) 785-4344, email at reservations@parishplayers.org, or online at https://www.parishplayers.org

(Photo, top, rehearsal, Rhinoceros, courtesy of Kate Willard. The trailer, above, includes rehearsal scenes and Kate and the actors speaking to the camera.)

—————————————————

Thank you! You’re reading Artful, a blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley, and I hope you’ll subscribe (still free) and then share this post with your friends and on your social media. Help push us over the top by sending this post to someone you know. We are now ever-approaching 3000 subscribers.

And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.