Tango
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Coming of age in communist Poland, Mrozek took two directions in his early work. Some-times he addressed abuses of centralized power and the curtailment of human freedom: in his first script, The Police (1958), an extraordinarily effective police force eliminates all disloyalty and must therefore create faux dissenters to justify its existence. Other times Mrozek concentrated on more pitiable human foibles. In an early short story a frugal zookeeper orders an inflatable elephant, and when a stiff wind carries the fake beast away, schoolchildren who’ve been told that elephants weigh 13,000 pounds grow disillusioned, abandon their studies, and ultimately refuse to believe in elephants.
Mrozek fled Poland in 1963 and the following year wrote Tango, the play that gave him international stature. Combining the dual strains of his early satire, Tango is on its surface a send-up of the well-made bourgeois comedy, with a younger generation struggling against the world imposed on them by their elders. But paradoxically the adult world here is one of perpetual adolescence, championed by middle-aged experimental artist Stomil and his free-loving wife, Eleanor. Decades earlier Stomil and Eleanor’s generation had “opposed everything” in a bloodless cultural revolution so thorough it eliminated all social rules and conventions. Now the two of them while away their days, indulging every passing whim, while Eleanor’s mother, Eugenia, descends into cheerful senility and her stodgy brother, Eugene, strains to remain au courant. But when Stomil and Eleanor’s son, Arthur, returns from college with a newfound desire for structure, justified by an endless stream of inflexible intellectual babble, a counterrevolution occurs. Stuffing his parents into respectable middle-class attire, Arthur transforms simpleminded freeloader Eddie into a proper servant and announces, to everyone’s horror, that he’s going to get married and become a doctor.
When: Through 1/29: Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 4 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Maciek Zamorski.
