Tango

It takes about two minutes to see why UCSD Theatre and Dance named Gabor Tompa head of its MFA directing program. His staging of Slawomir Mrozek's surreal satire opens with three people playing cards. Amid cigarette smoke and an almost frozen stillness, they wager like fiends. It's like listening to a 78 rpm record played at 33 1/3. In that brief opening, Tompa sets the tone and establishes dynamic relationships for a play that, in lesser hands, can stumble at every turn. A tango combines dominance with assent. As a play, Tango follows the rise of a dictator in a society become, to his eyes at least, too permissive, "too disgustingly tolerant." Twenty-five-year-old Arthur's a zealot with a "missionary complex." His parents are postrevolutionary, sort of (as parts of them still cling to the old ways). The play becomes a tango, without assent, between Arthur's "cast-iron principles" and his family's liberation. The script combines the bizarre with serious philosophical debates and could become too heavy-handed and theory-driven. In Tompa's hands, the opposite happens: it's funny! And the debates get performed with such passion that the ideas - about order and freedom and social responsibility and the solutions for each - become urgent. As Arthur, who changes from an idealist with anomie to a menace, Brandon Taylor is foremost among equals in a strong, versatile cast. What does a room look like that hasn't been cleaned in 15 years? Answer: Nikki Black's newspaper-strewn set, the walls the color of cream gone sour. Like the play, Steven Sakowski's expert lighting combines genres: from bright and chipper to cold shafts to heated, stage left, and blizzard conditions, right.


Worth a try.

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