After the first act curtain had fallen at the Longacre the other night, I stood out on West 48th Street, enjoying the post-blizzard thaw, but rather guiltily reading the blow-up photostats of the leading New York reviews. To a man, they were enthusiastic, and a couple turned handsprings. Eugene Ionesco’s play about the people of a small town turning into rhinoceroses seemed to them the finest and zaniest inspiration of the season. I returned, chastened, to my seat, yielded myself as emphatically as possible to Acts Two and Three, but came away feeling just as I had felt a couple of hours before—somewhere between seriously bored and ruefully indifferent.
A day or two later, in the Parisian weekly Arts, I read a letter from Ionesco himself. He had just returned from New York, and he was appalled. The Longacre production, he claimed, had nothing to do with his original text. “It seems that the Americans only wish to see in the play a critique of ‘American conformism,’ whereas it was a critique of totalitarianism that
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