Tango

TimeOut Chicago

January 19, 2006
BY CHRIS PIATT

It's always a little uncomfortable when the best analogy you have for a foreign play from another era is an American sitcom. But there's Mrozek's absurdist 1965 Tango, in which the uptight, toe-the-line son (played here by the prime Kamie with equal parts hair wax and hair trigger) from a family of law-breaking artists reaches his breaking point and insists that the whole clan clean up its act or else. As esoteric mother and father gaze at their son Arthur with distant confusion (How could they have raised such a conservative? Where did they go wrong?), it's impossible not to recall Alex P. Keaton's faded hippie parents, flummoxed as to how their baby boy ended up with a Reagan fetish. Director Bruce knows how to illuminate the contrast brightly, and manages to create some fine stage pictures as well. Yet for much of the two-and-a-half-hour running time, the absurdity in Mrozek's text is played for psychological naturalism. Bruce's Wonka-tart cast doesn't fare nearly as well when playing for earnest, and the proceedings mean a little less in these moments. But as the chaos climaxes in Act II with the muscular rise of the play's ostensibly dimmest character (Christopher Kaye, who's ideally numbskulled as the family's live-in gigolo), we see what happens when clear-headed, linear thinkers like Arthur and abstract thinkers like his folks are busy butting heads: Brute simpletons violently take over. Tango sneaks up on you with this idea, and the surprise rush overrides the moments of boredom.