Salvador Dali at the Vincennes Zoo, attempting to paint a rhinoceros skewering a Vermeer. Alamy Stock photo.
An Interview with Author and Professor Michael Chemers
About Michael Chemers
Michael Chemers is professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz. Michael researches the “dramaturgy of empathy,” a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary inquiry that seeks to understand how performance culture moves ideas about compassion and kindness (and conversely, fear and hatred) through social networks. Michael is the founder of the ‘Ghost Light’ model of dramaturgy: a muscular, creatively engaged, artistically vibrant approach to dramaturgy that requires thorough historical understanding, theoretical training broad and deep, and a passionate dedication to creating powerful, relevant performances of all types. Through his writings, which have been translated into several languages, this model has become popular around the world.
Michael Chemers recent book is The Monster in Theater History: The Thing of Darkness, published by Routledge (2018).
Interview Part I: Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Context
[This is part 1 of 4. To read the other 3 parts of the interview, click the links at the bottom of this page.]
TS: Michael Chemers, welcome to In Dark Times! This is our first blog post in an interview format. In future, we hope to have podcasting capability, but for now we are delighted to offer this interview in print.
MC: Thanks, Tedd I’m really happy to be here. I’m a big fan of In Dark Times, and since I am a theater-based scholar, I’m all in favor of dialogue!
TS: Before diving into our topic of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, please tell us a little bit about yourself and your work as a professor of theater arts…
MC: Well I teach. I teach dramatic literature, and my specialization is history and theory of dramaturgy and literary studies, but my work is really more wide ranging. In general, I’m very interested in the human experience of empathy and what it is that makes us feel kindly towards one another and what it is that is the opposite of that, which is fear.
I’m interested in the way that we represent things that are fearful or horrific in culture. And specifically, I’m interested in monsters. So I’m really interested in the way that playwrights over the years have used monstrous characters and monster situations to convey important pieces of information about their culture and about themselves–what they fear and what they love.
TS: You know, as I was reading your recent book, one of the things that came up for me — probably because the subject matter is theatrical – is the extent to which your interest in empathy gets focalized at the level of community response.
Do you agree that in the context of the theater, caring, understood as experiencing and expressing empathy, naturally tends toward what the Germans call ‘gemeinschaft’–which gets translated as ‘community’ but means something more that?
MC: Absolutely yes. And not just theater. I think that the significance of this community response is something that we’re appreciating more and more now. But I think the ancient Greeks had a really good take on this—the way that community responses determine the individual, on how representation and culture changes the way that people think and how this in turn changes their actions.
One of the things that I document in my book which I think is relevant to our discussion today–if I can sort of foreshadow what we are going to talk about—is how in the 1930s the Nazis in Germany began touring an exhibit of degenerate art. And it was it was art about Jews, and art by Jews and other so-called enemies of the state. And they toured it around, and the ‘mascot’ of this exhibition was a painting that had been done by the propagandists of a character which is a monster. It’s called The Wicked Jew or the Eternal Jew. And it turns out that this is a monster that has been present in European folklore for about a thousand years.
One of the myths around this figure is that he was present at the crucifixion and made an off-color joke at Jesus’s expense. It turns out that the supposed joke he told changes a lot over time, which itself is actually very funny—one of the things I’m really interested to find out is exactly what the joke was that he told. It’s different in different places, but in any case—
TS: I know what it was! The Aristocrats!
[Laughter]
MC: The point here is that this figure of the Eternal Jew, historically a figure of pity, got transformed in the Nazi period through aesthetic representation into an object of extreme hatred, one used to incite violence.
TS: Well, I think part of the reason we are talking about the irreducibility and thus importance of community is that with Rhinoceros, we are headed into a discussion about a complex set of interactions between aesthetic judgment, moral judgment, and politics. Where you have an aesthetic experience and then a moral response that plays out in community, that response is also a political one. This is what I mean by irreducible. Naturally all of this is implied by an aestheticized politics as you just described.
MC: That’s right. You know in the 1950s zombies were slow moving and easy to outwit. They were just scary because of their implacability. Right now, zombies are fast and they can sometimes make decisions and they come in hordes and even my wife and I have been binge watching “I, Zombie” where the zombie winds up becoming like a persecuted minority within society. So the monster changes to reflect how our fears change, and these fears reflect the changing culture.
TS: You know, just last night—quite by accident– we were half-watching the Tom Cruise remake of “The Mummy.” And at some point, toward the end, Matt said, “Oh, my God, this movie is about a weremummy! What’s up with that?
[Laughter]
MC: Yeah. You know, like in the days of Hammer Films it would have been unthinkable!
TS: When we first started In Dark Times, we knew we would be talking a lot about about the dynamics of fascism. So we created a section of our site called “Ur-Fascism,” and I headlined it with a Dürer etching of a rhinoceros, and a quote from Ionesco’s play, from the pivotal scene where the character Jean actually transforms in the midst of an argument with Berenger. Then I put it aside for about a year and a half to do other things, but I knew I’d be coming back to it.
And then I had this moment where it occurred to me that I actually knew somebody who had recently written a book about–among other things–what it means when people undergo monstrous transformations in literature, film and theater–so I thought I would ask you if you would talk to me about it.
MC: Good to go.
TS: Let’s start with the play’s reception. I was looking at some recent reviews of the play so I saw that it’s been staged in Los Angeles, Toronto, and in Edinburgh all between August 2017 and April 2018. I’m sure there are a lot of other productions, large and small.
MC: When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and leader of the free world the people in my community, people who think about theater–particularly those of us who are working in universities where the students are very concerned about what this means for progressive ideas–started brainstorming among ourselves what would be good plays that we can present to our students that would help them make sense out of what’s going on or help them express their fears. And there are really three that keep coming up. Richard III, Ubu Roi, which is a very important play by Alfred Jarry that sort of signals the beginning of the French avant garde theater movement in the 1890s. Then Rhinoceros is the third one that really keeps coming up again and again.
MC: All three of these are in my top five favorite plays of all time by the way. Not just because of the pull of the politics, but because I think they’re beautifully written plays and very powerful; but rhinoceros in particular because it’s also a very funny play.
TS: Interesting that you should mention that. This leads into something I wanted to ask you about. I was comparing contemporary reviews to the original reviews from 60-61. The recent review in the LA Times says that the play is about “horror at the fragility of norms and the easy surrender of humanity.” That’s not too bad at all. Yet looking at the early reviews, the comedic aspect is really foregrounded. Clearly, these first audiences thought this was some sort of light-hearted farcical romp.
TS: I have to admit that in the second year of Trump I’m incapable of even reading it that way—maybe if I saw it staged for laughs I would understand it like that in the end. But I I’m reading this with a feeling of unfolding horror throughout the play. So if I’m right about this, how do you think it was received more as an absurdist thing and is less so today?
MC: I think what has changed is the way that we as a culture understand absurdism. There was a writer called Martin Esslin, a great critic and theater scholar who wrote a book called Theater of the Absurd in the 60s, and what he was trying to do was find some way of talking about a genre of plays that were emerging post World War II.
And these include the plays of Beckett like Waiting for Godot for instance, and in America Arthur Kopit–and Ionesco was grouped with these guys in which the plays seemed to articulate some sense of complete disconnect from any kind of overriding moral framework that that made the universe make sense. And you can see how this would make sense for people who had lived through the horrors of World War II, particularly in Europe. There seemed to be no other rhyme or reason to it. People looking back were trying to make sense of what happened–how did we get from being this culture that loved art and music and food and turning into–
TS: But it’s written in the 60s, so the reaction to it seems to be coming from a place of relative safety.
MC: Yes exactly. You look at what’s happening in the Western world the 1960s–there’s this massive rejection of fascism and an embrace of its opposite the free love and hippies and counterculture—
TS: –and part of the foundation of that is the security of the welfare state which had not yet unraveled—
MC: There you go…and now there can be no doubt that all over the Western world, people are falling back into these patterns, and not hesitantly, and not ignorantly.
TS: Not only are people falling back into these patterns, but I think that what makes the play so relevant is the feeling of powerlessness around this transformation is also palpable. It doesn’t even appear to have a solution to it, either. There’s something slippery here. There’s an inability to know how to respond.
MC: Ionesco himself was very cagey on the subject. So, for instance, he and Bertolt Brecht were in Paris at the same time and he very much wanted to meet Brecht, who was of course a very strong political writer, and Brecht refused to meet with him because Ionesco had been grouped in with the absurdists and the absurdists were being called apolitical.
When you take a look at Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for instance it’s very hard to pin down what that play is about and its intentions. So, Ionesco, in his writings, said that he never wanted to be categorized as absurdist—because dreams, and irrationality and chaos are actually the way that we experience the world. But it’s very difficult for us nowadays to consider Rhinoceros and look back at the Nazification of Europe and not see the connection there.
TS: There’s the famous lines from Brecht: Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes, there will be singing–about the dark times.
MC: Right. Right. Oh nice.
TS: By the way, the only theater performance I’ve personally ever been involved in was Beckett.
MC: Really?
TS: I was in a dramatization of one of the radio plays, All That Fall, and I did Beckett in drag, playing Mrs. Rooney.
MC: Oh fantastic. That’s great. By the way, II will be performing in drag myself.
TS: Oh really!
MC: Yes, in a production of The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman directed by Danny Shay.
But that’s another day and another play–in Ionesco’s play, people in this unassuming little village in France somewhere, suddenly start—for no reason whatsoever–turning into rhinoceroses; and the way that the other people react to it is an indication of why they are turning into rhinoceroses.
[To read the second part of this interview, click on the link below for part 2: “Interview Part 2, Reading Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.”]
Complete Series
