Productions

In Eugene Ionesco’s 1958 farce, Rhinoceros, a number of characters hear sweet music in the trumpeting of rhinos carousing on the streets of a provincial French town. Where we hear something resembling a seventh-grade kid learning to play a coronet, they hear Audra McDonald. Yet the trumpeting is only music to those in the throes of a mysterious transformation from human to pachyderm.

Charles L. Mee’s “Iphigenia,” the third and final offering in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, offers yet another reconsidered Greek classic by Mee that seems as timely as today’s headlines.

Mee’s reinvention of Euripides’ cosmic battle of nature and civilization, of gods and man, is enacted with a stinging contemporary edge in Frédérique Michel’s production at City Garage.

Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy concentrates, like Homer’s The Odyssey, on the impulses behind cruelty and war. This is the story of the eponymous general upon his return from a 10-year military campaign to his wife, Clytemnestra, who seethes that her husband sacrificed their daughter to the gods for favorable sea winds.

Müller’s play is less about war than it is about the chaos and malice that follows it. And the work also tries to figure out what it was in the German psyche during the 20th century that gave rise to so much wickedness, despotism, and hatred.

Director Frederique Michel’s adaptation of Kathy Acker’s novel is largely faithful to the spirit of the late post-punk novelist’s writing — a sexually obsessed, fetishistic stroll, barefoot, along a road strewn with shattered glass.

In Frederique Michel’s delightful production of Eugene Ionesco’s darkly absurdist comedy, a young Student arrives at a Paris home, excited for his first lesson with his new tutor: a tightly wound Professor. At first the Professor is diffident and unsure of himself, and the Student seems confident and optimistic. However, as the lesson continues, the balance of power shifts.

Charles A. Duncombe’s satire begins as an audition for a game show in which contestants will compete to be voted the program’s “most patriotic,” and ends as a Grand Inquisitor scene for post-9/11 America.

French scribe Boris Vian’s brutal postwar comedy instantly brings Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to mind – the same style of absurdist, domestic farce later used by Christopher Durang, but here saturated in political allegory. Perpetually fleeing the roar of an enigmatic heartbeat, a couple and their daughter keep finding refuge upstairs in a series of ever-smaller apartments attached to the same stairwell. Like Ionesco’s villagers, they try to make the best of the growing menace, while blithely pulverizing a bandaged scapegoat figure (‘danger’) who’s present in each abode.

Freud’s Oedipus complex is borrowed from Sophocles’ mystery; adaptor Charles A. Duncombe lobs the ball back into Sophocles’ court with an absorbing 90-minute shot propelled by modern psychology’s Papa.