Angst Merchants in BVDs

Pantomime speaks in a universal language, and it is usually baby talk. At New York's City Center, the Polish Mime Theater has added music, choreography and a variety of props to the basic vocabulary, all to no avail. The company puts extravagant technical competence at the service of canary-brained ideas.

Known as the Henryk Tomaszewski troupe, after its director-producer and leading actor, the ten-year-old company is actually considered avant-garde in Poland--though it is ideologically safe enough to be permitted extensive tours outside the Communist bloc. Despite its considerable success in other European countries, the fundamental trouble, for U.S. theatergoers, is that Poland is just too too off-Broadway. At any rate, the program is saturated with all the fashionably despairing notions that stir tempests in the espresso cups of Greenwich Village coffeehouses. The angst comes in all flavors and includes Everyman's thwarted desire to communicate with Everyman, the torment of the creative artist, the solitary anguish of existence, and the torturing sense of living in the shadow of the Apocalypse.

Coagulated Syrup. The company's longest single item is "The Post Office," a sort of Our Town story as Kafka might retell it. A dusty, creaky, self-important postmaster rubber-stamps his way through bizarre, touching and humdrum encounters with the town's citizens. At skit's end, the postmaster is walking around with an inverted wastebasket covering his head. Poof! The postmaster disappears, but the basket is still there. This is typical of the evening's pseudoprofundities--here today, and a basket case tomorrow.

One pantomimic cliche that turns up endlessly is the in-place step-slide, in which a character appears to be trekking across a tundra of coagulated syrup. Considerably fresher, though not terribly pertinent, is the occasional very cool jazz accompaniment that suggests that all attempts to immunize Iron Curtain countries from the music of the decadent West have failed.

Like Male Rockettes. The few girls in the troupe are fetchingly swaddled in neck-length nylons. The men seem to be clad in flesh-colored BVDs on which someone has apparently traced the entire human nervous system. The net effect is rather unhinging, like watching a platoon of nude male Rockettes undergoing surgery.

As Marcel Marceau has proved, a brilliant mime can reveal wistful, grief-stricken and joyous states of human feeling. But after an evening of planned misery with the Polish Mime Theater, one merely wonders if Communism can really be all that bad.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.