Tails and Short Pants

AT FIRST, Tango seems to be just another avant-garde play with a gimmick. In this case the cute twist is a generation-gap role-reversal. The older members of the family are non-conformists and the young son is a traditionalist. By the time act one comes to a close, the audience feels as if it's being hit over the head with this witty, bizarre, but tediously predictable pattern.

Arthur, the son, arrives home to find his relatives worshipping unconventionality and chaos. His grandmother sleeps on a catafalque; uncle Eugene sports tails and short pants; Stomil, his father, loudly promulgates a "revolution in aesthetics and morality;" and Stomil's wife Eleanor brags aloud of sleeping with the servant. And all the while young Arthur wears a conservative suit, scorns art and passionately urges his family to return to tradition and order.

All of this is well enough done, but not until Mrozek begins to explore these deceptively complicated characters in depth does the symmetry of the role-reversal scheme breakdown, revealing some of the more profound themes beneath.

Sexism and its cultural and tradition-linked contradictions emerge in highly charged exchanges between an intense, riveting Arthur (Jeffrey Rubin) and Ala (Diana Silver). Arthur argues for a practical marriage based on "pleasure and profit" while hypocritically undermining his criticism of loose mores with a blunt display of sexual aggression.

Ala agrees to marry Arthur, and Stomil (effectively portrayed by Tom Champion) also finds his orchestrated chaos turned to order by his son. Arthur finally convinces his father to assert his masculinity in a conventional, gun-toting way, but soon brute force supplants indoctrination in the son's effort to use "tradition" as the key to the future. Once the family agrees to the traditional marriage and accepts "order," Arthur begins to seek other answers; from "order" he shifts to "death," and then to "power."

What results is a nicely staged mass confusion, in which allegiances and beliefs switch with a rapidity befitting Ionesco and the theater of the Absurd. This play is full of characters constantly theorizing and grappling with themselves on stage. It is here that a political theme begins to emerge that of interregnum Poland intellectualizing, searching itself, and finally resisting outside aggression.

But these actions and emotions are powerful even when stripped of political implication. What helps Tango in this production are portrayals by all seven cast members that bring alive these feelings of leading, following, searching.