Drama from Post-War Poland

NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD is producing drama as exciting as the stuff that has come out of post-war Poland. Anybody who's seen Akropolis, the film of Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theater, can bear me out on that. Slawomir Mrozek has already made his mark on modern theater with such widely produced plays as Tango and Police. Like many of his Polish contemporaries, he is preoccupied with the lessons of the Hitler regime. (Grotowski's actors, for instance, wear army fatigues no matter what play they are doing, while dismembered department-store mannequins and blood-stained clothing are common props in current Polish stage design.) The strength of Mrozek's allusion varies from play to play, but in all three works in the present collection, one senses a desperate effort to condemn and at the same time to explain the actions of individuals under Hitler. "This is how people operate," Mrozek seems to be saying. "I'm putting them in absurd situations, of course, but they behaved just as absurdly in a real situation not too long ago."

Striptease is the best and also the shortest of the three plays. For unknown reasons, two strangers suddenly find themselves trapped in a single room, and in between rationalizing their behavior, they obey the directions of a gigantic hand, which gestures to them to remove their clothes. The gimmick alone is clever, and Mrozek, with a fine sense of the dramatic, skillfully brings out the contrast between the feeble human discussions and the powerful silence of the Hand.

BUT THE PLAY is more than just a gimmick. Mrozek expands on the absurd situation with dialogue that is eerie because of its casual tone of day-to-day realism. In the short time we spend with them, we develop definite feelings about Mr. I and Mr. II. Through their comments, even the Hand acquires a distinct personality ("Somebody's fingernails could use a good cleaning, if I may venture an opinion," comments Mr. I).

Basically, the argument between the two men deals with how they should react to their unexplained imprisonment. Mr. I refuses to make any choices, insisting that only in this way can he remain entirely free: "The potential of my freedom has remained unchanged. I have not made a choice, I have in no way confined myself. The doors were closed for external reasons. I am the same person that I was before. As you may have noticed, I did not even get up from my chair." Mr. II, on the other hand, is an activist. With his endearing, common-sense approach, Mr. II makes Mr. I look like a pedantic old fool. Yet it is part of Mrozek's blind justice that they both receive the same fate--Mr. I may not be any better off than Mr. II because of his refusal to act, but neither is he finally worse off.

The connections to the Hitler era are obvious: the unquestioning obedience to authority, the abnegation of responsibility, the refusal to alter ordinary patterns of behavior. But these issues apply to other political situations as well, and the play does not depend on the memory of Hitler for its power. Mrozek has created a situation which alludes to the war years and at the same time transcends that specific period. Placed in such a situation, we would be just as likely as Mr. I or Mr. II to act the way they do. We cannot find excuses or explanations for their actions in external conditions, because there are no external conditions in this play.

UNFORTUNATELY, I cannot give the same praise to either Repeat Performance or The Prophets, the other two plays in the collection. They both hammer in their central points much too strongly, lacking the humorous touch of Striptease. Ironically, this humor is what enables us to take Striptease seriously; we identify with Mr. I and Mr. II partly because they are funny. In the two longer plays, Mrozek becomes ponderously moralistic, and as a result we distance ourselves from his rigidly tragic characters.

The plots, too, have less potential than in Striptease. In Repeat Performance, Hitler's ghost returns to haunt Daddy, first as a garishly dressed woman and then as a bald-headed soldier. The Ghost reproaches Daddy for ceasing to love him, and then attempts to seduce Daddy's son. (Daddy, meanwhile, is running off with his daughter-in-law, She. The purpose of this subplot is never made quite clear.) With uncharacteristic heavy-handedness, Mrozek ends the play by blatantly stating his main point in the Ghost's last lines: "Time for me to go. But I'll be back. Tomorrow night. Or the next. I'll drop in from time to time...Fathers don't like it when I come." We have learned to expect greater subtlety from Mrozek.

IN THE PROPHETS, two identical saviors appear in a standing-room-only world of the future. The governing Regent, his assistant, the Bailiff, and Professors Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar conspire to kill off one of the Prophets so that the other can take over. But their plan miscarries, and both Prophets as well as all of the plotters except the Bailiff end up dead. As you may suspect, the parallel to the original Christ story is a little like a smack in the face. Dramatically, though, it's a better play than Repeat Performance: there is one very good chase scene, and a few of the characters have a chance to become appealing individuals.

I don't mean to be hard on Mrozek. Most of my criticisms deal with problems that are bothersome in print, and I suspect that they may disappear or at least diminish on stage. If I were to point out a single damning fault, it would be that the situations are not open-ended enough. Once we learn the circumstances, we know everything. There is character revelation, but no character development. Curiously enough, this means that the endings themselves are too open--that is, the plays tend to trail off rather than ending definitively. When Mrozek does try to create a real ending, as in Repeat Performance, he tries too hard. He's better at just throwing his characters on stage and then inexplicably plucking them off, the way he does in Striptease. He creates situations rather than plots, and therefore he cannot use the standard dramatic techniques for opening and closing a play, which depend on a certain amount of development within the play. Before his works achieve the level they promise, he will have to find his own method of shaping his plays, somewhere in between the formal structure of traditional theater and the intentional formlessness of the Theater of the Absurd. In the meantime, his plays deserve attention purely for their cleverly absurd situations and their casual, flippant dialogue, which combine to produce Mrozek's special brand of ironic humor.