At the very end of the play, as well as in history, the rhinoceros drowns in the sea on the boat ride to Europe.
Tracing the events surrounding the arrival of a one-horned Indian rhinoceros to Renaissance Europe, KT Shivak and Rowan Magee’s Rhynoceron is dramaturgically structured as two parts: the first half from the perspective of gawking gaze of human collectors and the second half from that of the animal, the rhinoceron. Presented at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January 2026 at the Chopin Theater, the story begins in the early 16th century, when global trade and imperial expansion reshaped the world: we witness a mysteriously one-horned rhinoceron traded hands from an Indian sultan to the King Manual of Portugal, then to the Pope Leo X, and then eventually immortalized in a woodcut by the printmaker Albrecht Dürer, even though the artist never saw him with his own eyes. (The play is titled Rhynoceron because that is the name Dürer mistakenly wrote down in his drawing.) Through the expanding use of the printing press, the image spread across Europe and became a symbol of a beast that is at once terrible and desirable, sparking an obsession that lasted for hundreds of years. In Rhynoceron, even when they are directly manipulated by puppeteers to come alive, animals exist in a compromised mode of being. They are always confined to various kinds of containers. Sometimes, as objects of desire for collectors, the animals are featured as mini-caricatures that remain in a toy theater box; other times, through the perspective of Dürer, they are represented as flat print images that are pressed into a book.
The most visually mesmerizing container of this sort, however, appears in the very beginning of the show. When the lights come up, the puppeteers roll on an extremely eerie Frankenstein object: it is an hourglass-shaped wooden sculpture, with the upper bodies of two deer protruding from the two sides of the structure. The front bears the words “The King” in gold, announcing the ownership of this object. As the puppeteers slowly open the structure, the object turns out to be a reliquary, where the king stores the bodily remains of his animal collection. The opening sequence culminates in a clear act of violence: the horn of the deer is chopped off by the puppeteer, right in front of our eyes.
Innovatively designed yet grounded in historical references, the objects of Rhynoceron tell a story at once rooted in history and resonant in the present. The cutting of the antlers, in particular, points to the present day where rhinos continue to face extinction at the hands of humans who want to harvest their horns. This critique hinges on the moment when the show switches its setting to open nature, where we witness puppeteers take on the role of hunters, capturing flying cranes and galloping deer from their natural habitat. The play then transitions to the perspective of the Rhynoceron, confronting this human obsession as a source of violence and destruction. The large cast of characters are vividly performed by an ensemble of just three puppeteers (Chih-Jou Cheng, Jacky Kelsey, and Shivak herself). What’s more, the two-part structure is cleverly facilitated by two distinctive styles of puppet design. From the first half to the second half, the puppets also go through a transformation from miniature toy theater to real-size, life-like puppets, further bending the boundary between things and animated lives.
When the life-size and lifelike rhino puppet enters the stage, we are finally delivered the moment we have all been waiting for: the exquisitely realistic giant puppet that is featured on publicity materials as the central image of attraction. This rhino puppet––so monumental in its scale yet so intricately detailed in its carving––displays an awe-inspiring wonder that far exceeds the shallow and reductive imagination of the greedy humans. Unlike Dürer who carved his image of the rhino to be a pastiche of scientific illustration and imagination based on Pliny the Elder’s description of mythical beasts, Shivak’s design of the puppet is rooted in their careful observation of the actual animals. Not only is the rhino sculpted to the finest detail, including every wrinkle on his skin, the puppet’s eyes (to the extent of eyelashes) and ears are closely designed to be able to move subtly in the exact same ways as the actual animals. From miniature toy theater to life-size and lifelike, the performance takes up puppetry as a dynamic and complex process, where different ways of making and manipulating objects do not simply turn objects into subjects but provide a unique access for us to reimagine the objects with a diverse mode of liveliness, demanding that we rediscover the subjecthood of animals that we have long ignored and suppressed.
At the very end of the play, as well as in history, the rhinoceros drowns in the sea on the boat ride to Europe. When they collapse onto the ground, the chains that are used to capture them are also finally released. The puppeteers bring out a thin scroll cluttered with illustrated heads and hands that symbolize the gawking gaze and acquisitive desire of humans. At first, the gauze is only vaguely visible to the audience. But, as the light shifts in its direction, the severed heads and hands grow more and more visible. Bit by bit, we slowly realize that the scroll is so thin that we can also see the heads and hands of the puppeteers that are pressed against the gauze, calling our attention to the very act of puppeteering. This slow transformation from invisibility to visibility, along with the depiction of gawking, forced me as an audience member to reflect on the nature of my own viewing and the very consequences of the different ways of seeing. As I jotted down these thoughts in my notebook, the house light came back on, and many audience members rushed onto the stage to take photos of the exquisite rhino puppet. Under the neutral wash of house lights, however, the rhino puppet lay flat on the ground, pulling me out of the illusion of a performance where the lost animal was but temporarily reanimated into life. If, as Shivak and Magee remind us in their program note, “our history with rhinos is marked by a series of mistakes; moral and mythological, political and economical, and in Dürer’s case–grammatical,” the performance no doubt compelling and beautiful lays bare this history of mistakes, but whether these mistakes will be repeated is a question that persists after the curtain closes, beyond the confinement of any containers, even that of the theater.
Yiwen Wu is a PhD candidate at UChicago, in the joint program between Theater & Performance Studies and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. She’s also a playwright-director for puppet plays, whose credits include Sattva (Special Recognition Award, 2024 Wuzhen Theater Festival) and The Story of Lady Li (Jim Henson Foundation’s Artist Grant, 2023).
All article photos by Richard Termine. Courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.