
The Rhino Lassies is a feminist dark comedy about the horrors of modern wellness culture. The story follows two meticulously maintained femme-tastic creatures who harbour a mortifying secret: in their true form, buried under a painstakingly maintained exterior, they are actually magnificent rhinoceros. Their lives intersect when they show up at the same restaurant, each attending a socially draining—yet excruciatingly mandatory—event. They each experience an untimely bodily function and are brought together in the sort-of privacy of the public bathroom. Here they recognize something familiar in one another and that feeling of difference they were trying to make extinct becomes louder. As they endeavor to unearth what phantasmic connection exists between them, they discover the bathroom is not what it seems. They are, in fact, trapped in Wellness Purgatory and must move through some painful personal and cultural histories in order to emerge as the bull-headed Rhino Lassies they are meant to be. Performed in the style of mask and bouffon, this play explores connection, individualism, and the complex desire to be “well.”
The Rhino Lassies is currently in development. It was part of Tarragon Theatre’s Greenhouse Residency (January 2024) and we performed a new excerpt at Toronto’s inaugural What the Festival (September 2024).
Created and performed by Alexandra Simpson and Morgan Brie Johnson
Mask design by Alexandra Simpson.

