The Rhinoceros Theatre Festival is an odd institution. When it was started 20 years ago, the International Theatre Festival of Chicago was still going strong; but the ITFC shut down in 1994, so the Rhino Fest has spent three quarters of its life as a fringe event in a city lacking the grand fete. Think of a beard without a chin. And where, say, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe attracts productions from all over the world, the Rhino’s impulse is expressly nativist: only local artists present work. Indeed, it can seem sometimes as if only local artists watch the work, as well. The other night, when a Rhino show at the Viaduct Theater ended, I was the only one in the audience who got up to leave. Everybody-everybody-else there was apparently waiting to greet their friends in the cast. This isn’t even approximately a healthy set of circumstances. The Rhino Fest’s grassroots Chicagocentrism would make a lot more sense if it were balanced by the combination of global expansiveness and careful selectivity that characterized the ITFC.
