The Value Vacuum

Grandma trots about in tennis sneakers and a red baseball cap. Papa is a fat slob in unbuttoned pajamas, who has spent a lifetime dabbling in experimental theater. Mama reminisces over an early tussle for bohemian freedom in which she and Papa made love in the front row of the orchestra during a performance of Tannhaeuser. Currently, she sleeps with a grinning Neanderthal manservant named Eddie, while Papa affects not to notice.

When Son Arthur returns to this zany household, he is appalled, heartsick and intellectually in anguish. Eager to exercise the sacred right of the young to rebel, Arthur (David Margulies) finds he has nothing to rebel against in his totally permissive home except the permissiveness itself. This is the provocative core of Tango, Slawomir Mrozek's incisive comedy of debased manners, shattered forms, and the contemporary value vacuum. Mrozek, 38, is a Polish writer whose passport was canceled when he condemned Poland's role in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He now lives in Paris as a stateless person.

Rule of Force. Yet anyone who tries to decipher Tango as some sort of Iron Curtain cryptogram will miss half the fun and pertinence of the play. The socio-intellectual turbulence with which it stirs blows through all curtains, East or West. Arthur begins his counterrevolution with a stunning proposal--of marriage. Instead of just sleeping with his girl Ala as she expects, he wants her to marry him, and in church, of all places. He even asks for Grandma's blessing. She gives it without doffing her baseball cap.

But Arthur realizes that appearance is not reality. Old forms are dead forms if a living idea no longer animates them. Starved for a vital idea, Arthur hits on power, "an idea that can live in a vacuum." The rule of force is an idea simple enough for Eddie to grasp, and scarcely has Arthur assumed command of the household than Eddie strikes him dead.

The sequential logic of permissiveness to anarchy to tyranny may be questioned and is a trifle too methodical, but it is far merrier than the plotline suggests. Mrozek has a playful, astringent intelligence and a vision deeply colored by the theater of the absurd. One delightful sequence has Arthur trying to goad his father into surprising his wife in her lover's arms, while the father theorizes why he should not. Unfortunately, stilted direction robs this off-Broadway production of rightful humor, and the actors seem to admire the play without enjoying it. The translation into English is somewhat awkward and definitely requires idiomatic agility. Despite these production flaws, Tango is one of those rare and engrossing dramas that pays an evening-long courtesy call on the playgoer's mind.

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