BHCT Opens Discovery Series with Rhinoceros
The one-night reading brings Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic to Rapid City Saturday.
The Saturday night in Black Hills Community Theatre’s Studio Theater, a dozen local actors will take on a town where people are turning into rhinoceroses.
It sounds ridiculous. It is supposed to.
BHCT opens its 2026–27 Discovery Series on Sept. 12 with Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play about Bérenger, a man who watches as his friends and neighbors transform one by one into rhinoceroses. As the town’s social order disappears beneath them, Bérenger is left trying to decide whether he can hold onto his own humanity.
The play is funny, strange and increasingly unsettling, which makes it a natural fit for the Discovery Series.
Along with five mainstage productions and its education programs, BHCT presents a series of one-night-only play readings each season. The series gives the theater room to work with pieces chosen for their history, relevance, connections to other fields or unusual approach to making theater.
That can mean foundational classics one month and newer or less conventional work another. Unlike a fully staged mainstage production, the focus here is on the play itself and the ideas inside it.
For director Merlyn Q. Sell, Rhinoceros brings plenty to work with.
“Eugene Ionesco was a pioneering playwright of The Theatre of the Absurd, a style that flourished after World War II and examined the often pointless and futile aspects of modern life,” Sell said.
Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros in 1959, drawing in part from his experiences growing up in Romania during the 1930s.
“Rhinoceros was heavily influenced by Ionesco’s youth in 1930s Romania where it seemed everyone was being drawn into the Nazi-affiliated Iron Guard,” Sell explained. “Ionesco used this experience of watching his own friends and mentors embrace this irrational and reactionary ideology as the basis of Rhinoceros, the story of a man who is by turns confused and horrified as those he loves and respects change into monsters.”
That history sits underneath a play that can still get a room laughing.
“On the surface the play is a delightfully ridiculous comedy, but it’s something else too,” Sell said. “It’s a timeless warning of how our very human desire to belong, to be a part of a community, can lead to inhumanity.”
For one night, BHCT will put that tension in the hands of a local cast featuring T.J. Wichmann, Dave DeChristopher, Sara Bowman, David Andrews, Ryan Puffer, Duane Neugebauer, Heidi Dehn, Connie Hubbard, Richard Wahlstrom, Lorie Chastain, Jonah Vasquez and Abby Simmons.
There are no rhinoceroses charging through a full mainstage set. This is a Discovery Series reading, built around actors, a script and an audience willing to follow a very strange town to its logical conclusion.
Know Before You Go
What: BHCT Discovery Series: Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Derek Prouse
When: Saturday, Sept. 12 at 7 p.m.
Where: Studio Theater, Performing Arts Center of Rapid City
Admission: Pay What You Want donation at the door
The Discovery Series is sponsored by Michael D. and Melissa Moore. Rhinoceros is additionally sponsored by Duane and Margie Neugebauer.