City Garage presents
Mariage Blanc
(White Wedding)
by Tadeusz Rozewicz
Translated by Adam Czerniawski

November 12th — December 19th, 1999

Directed by Frederique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Cast:
Bianca 	Cynthia Mance
Pauline	Erin Vincent
Father	Richard Grove
Mother	Katharina Lejono
Aunt	Cheryl Scaccio
Cook	Jennifer Dion
Grandfather	Gene Williams
Benjamin	Jonathan Liebhold
Mr. Felix	Bo Roberts
The Maids	Annet Culp, Eileen O’Connell, Justine Klineman
The Ghost of the Grandmother	Laura McCann

Production Staff:
Set, Sound and Lighting Design	Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Assistant Director	Jennifer Dion
Light and Sound Operator	Paradorn Thiel
Production photos	Carlos Alvarado
Costumes	Michele Gingembre, Erin Vincent

Time: The early 1900s
Place: A country house in Poland

The play runs approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes.
There will be a l0-minute intermission.

About the Play and Playwright:
	The great Polish critic Jan Kott wrote that “One cannot summarize a play by ... [Tadeusz] Rozewicz, just as one cannot summarize or narrate a circus number with trained seals or a trapeze act.” Rozewicz, born in 1921, is one of the group of prominent dramatists who emerged during the explosion of Polish Absurdist Theater during the repressive 1960s. Under the heavy censorship of the time, a theatre that was surreal, zany, farcical and bizarre became the means to express the forbidden. The dramatist emerged as the jester-priest who wielded the weapon of the Absurd as a means of social and political discourse.
	Mariage Blanc — a French phrase that connotes a marriage without sexual union — is about a young girl who is about to be married. She is terrified of sex, and through the influence of her repressed and long-suffering mother, dreads the passage from childhood to womanhood. Men appear to her as beasts; her father haunts her imagination as an ogre of lust; the world of nature becomes a frightening, hallucinatory landscape of phallic threat. The play can be read on several levels: as an exploration of the explosive power of still-potent sexual taboos; as a metaphor for a Polish society possessed (at the time) by a repressive, paternalistic government, one that has been married against its will to an odious ideology. Perhaps it resonates most deeply as a meditation on the deep split that persists in Western culture between the head and the heart, the body and the soul, the mind and the spirit. Pagan sexuality erupts without warning and threatens to overwhelm the fragile order of society; wild beasts still haunt the dark forests of our imaginations; the virgin bride confronts her drunken bridegroom and transforms herself by an act of sheer will and self-annihilation into a desexualized creature that no longer can be raped. Rozewicz’s play becomes a dark fairy tale that allows us to play out in surreal fantasy our deepest fears and desires.

program notes by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.