Fringe Festival: 'White Rabbit Red Rabbit' and 'Rhinoceros'

That’s why White Rabbit Red Rabbit, performed here in Philadelphia as part of the Fringe Festival, is such a unique theatrical event. One actor, one script, one audience, one hour — and your perception of the theater, the people around you, and the world itself, is transformed. And I mean literally.

“No rehearsals. No director. No set. A different actor reads the script cold for the first time at each performance. . . . Will you listen? Will you really listen?” So go the program notes, and David Morse, the actor at our particular performance, follows the playwright’s instructions precisely. The lanky, white-haired, Philadelphia-born actor enters the new FringeArts performing space (a renovated waterworks) — empty save for a ladder, a chair, and a table, upon which sit two glasses of water and a vial of white powder. The house manager introduces Morse and hands him an envelope. Morse opens it and begins reading aloud one of the most transforming scripts I’ve ever heard in a theater.

Basically, Morse becomes a vehicle through which an Iranian writer named Nassim Soleimanpour, a multidisciplinary theater artist from Tehran, speaks directly to us. “I am the writer,” reads Morse, as Soleimanpour tells us about his life (he wrote the play on April 25, 2012, at age 29). “Where are you?” he asks. “Would you save an empty seat for me in the front row?” There’s an urgency in the playwright’s voice, explaining that he’s been denied a passport to travel because of his refusal to serve in the Iranian army. “You are my future,” he says. “My email address is [email protected]. Email me. I promise to answer if I’m alive. Help me to feel we’re connected.”

The playwright (through Morse) next takes us through a series of audience participation exercises. He asks us to imagine that we’re at the circus. One by one, he calls people up on stage, the first to play the role of a white rabbit trying to gain admittance, the second to play a bear who guards the entrance, and so on. The playwright instructs Morse to act like a cheetah who in turn acts like an ostrich and so on.

Recognizing limits

By this point we’re sufficiently entertained, involved — and vulnerable to the powers of this unique theater piece. “What are your limits of obedience?” the playwright asks abruptly, questioning Morse and us for having followed his orders. “How long will conformity hold your thoughts?” By now, we’re more than aware that this voice from Tehran is communicating an urgent warning about obedience and conformity in a threatening, dehumanizing world. That message comes in the form of the prophetic parable of the white rabbit that he continues to tell.

To recount that story here would be to rob you of the power of this transformative theater experience. Suffice it to say that we exited the auditorium united in the afterglow of a life-altering hour, in which a playwright halfway around the world was able to reach out to us more effectively than any digital, electronic, or telecommunication ever could.

“The past makes the future, and the future is the past,” warns the playwright. I imagine he’ll be getting a flood of email from FringeArts audiences as well as others as this script circles the globe, although its author cannot. (There will be a dozen more performances here, each read by a different actor). And I imagine those emails will express thanks to Soleimanpour for breaking down walls of ignorance and mistrust, for connecting us to him and to each other, and for helping us to experience anew the power of the written word.

Meanwhile, Soleimanpour’s question — “How long will conformity hold your thoughts?” — is being answered elsewhere in the FringeArts Festival. At the Adrienne Theater, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s forceful production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros offers another parable on conformity, featuring a different member of the animal kingdom.

"I am not capitulating"

Written in 1959, this absurdist comedy tells the story of Bérenger, bewildered resident of a provincial French town where all his fellow citizens are turning into rhinoceri. “I’m not joining you. I don’t understand you, I am a human being,” he protests, as one by one all his compatriots undergo this inexplicable metamorphosis. “I am the last man left, and I am staying that way until the end,” Bérenger exclaims defiantly. “I am not capitulating.”

Some of the greats have played Bérenger over the years — Laurence Olivier, Eli Wallach, Zero Mostel — and actor Ethan Lipkin holds his own in a production where, understandably, the grotesque rhinoceros headgear worn by other actors threatens to steal the show.

Ionesco’s isolation and resistance is the same that Soleimanpour is expressing half a world away and more than half a century later. Ionesco grew up in Romania during the rise of Nazism, a movement he feared and despised. As a youngster, he remembers seeing a peasant beaten by an army lieutenant for not taking his hat off at a military parade in Bucharest and witnessing firsthand the price of conformity.

Given the horrific reports coming out of the Middle East today of the slaughter of Christians and Shiites by the terrorist force called ISIS, the voices of Soleimanpour and Ionesco ring out loud and clear, warning us of the perils of nonconformity in the face of tyranny. “Could I be right and the whole country wrong?” Bérenger asks in Rhinoceros. Thanks to these two brave playwrights for posing that question and for answering it with the courage of their convictions.

For a review of Rhinoceros by Alaina Mabaso, click here.

For a review of Rhinoceros by Robert Zaller, click here.