Imago Theatre's “Julia's Place” Adapts Eugène Ionesco's Absurdist Play “Rhinoceros” - Willamette Week

In 1959, Eugène Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros, an absurdist satire about citizens of a small French town who, with little reason or explanation, spontaneously turn into nose-horned pachyderms from the African and Asiatic plains.

Ionesco based the story in part on his experience living in Bucharest during the 1930s, when a startling number of his peers expressed support for the nascent European fascist movement. Some of them even joined the Iron Guard, a paramilitary group that went on to serve in Marshal Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship.

In spite of its ridiculousness, Rhinoceros was and remains a chilling story about a “polite” society that finds itself utterly unprepared to face an extremist political group. Julia’s Place, a comedy written and directed by Jerry Mouawad and currently playing at the Imago Theatre, isn’t.

The play was inspired by Rhinoceros and very much wears its influence on its sleeve, but it mostly dispenses with the satire to focus on the elements of absurdity. The result is a show that, for all its creative artistic flourishes, feels out of step with its own subject matter.

The story occurs in Julia’s Place, an Italian restaurant whose clientele appears to be exclusively Porkchop (Josh Edward), a struggling writer, and Ralph (Noel Olkin), his aloof best friend. When rhinos begin to rampage through the streets of whatever city this is supposed to be, Porkchop, Ralph, and the restaurant’s sardonic owner, Julia (Carol Triffle), are forced to shelter in place and hope the whole thing blows over.

Part of Mouawad’s goal with Julia’s Place was to delineate it from the work that inspired it. “My piece left ambiguous why people turn into rhinoceroses,” he explains. “The entire play has the characters trying to determine why people are mutating.”

However, by focusing more on comedy than metaphor, Julia’s Place strips the rhinoceros premise of its caustic edge and leaves the audience with a zany screwball comedy whose jokes are, unfortunately, more often misses than hits. There’s some clever wordplay and an anarchic energy that’s infectious at times, but the play comes off more as a showcase for hacky schtick than anything else.

Julia’s Place isn’t without its charms. The cast are all game for the material they’re given, with Edward coming away as the MVP—mostly because his character doesn’t realize he’s in a comedy.

Many times it seems as if everyone is mugging for an invisible camera, but we never see Porkchop break. He’s in the throes of an existential crisis he can’t quite articulate, with his only reprieve being occasional banter with Ralph. Olken acquits himself well in that role, portraying Ralph as an earnest bumbler who quips like a wannabe Groucho Marx and is ultimately endearing, if more than a bit dense.

As in Rhinoceros, the eponymous animals in Julia’s Place are mostly kept offstage, presented through handmade shadow puppets and sound effects. This effectively establishes the rhinos as a mysterious threat that can rise up and stampede at any time, but makes them abstract enough they don’t clash with the story’s comic sensibilities.

The best moment in Julia’s Place comes near the end, when Porkchop temporarily joins the herd. He delivers a monologue about the experience of being a rhino, of having so much anger that can only be directed straight in front of you—and how that frustration can drive someone to do terrible things.

The line (and I’m paraphrasing here) is, “If you’re wrong, then the whole world can never be right.” It’s the closest Julia’s Place comes to matching Ionesco’s incisiveness, and it goes a long way toward elevating the show.

Ironically, Julia’s Place suffers because of its connection to Rhinoceros. Rather than building on Ionesco’s study of fascist indoctrination, Julia’s Place is content to let its characters navel-gaze and pontificate nonsensically rather than engage with the imminent threat to their lives (which may itself be a critique of 21st century Americans’ selfishness and self-involvement in the face of an imminent threat). There’s definitely creativity and originality on display in Julia’s Place that deserves to be celebrated, but the play may leave its audience wanting something more.

SEE IT: Julia’s Place plays at Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave., 503-231-9581, imagotheatre.com. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, through June 18. $20.

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