White marriage

Bianka and Paulinka are on the threshold of adulthood — at a time when the body, language and ideas about themselves begin to diverge sharply with the expectations of the world. Growing up in a White marriage, however, is not an innocent or natural process: it is an experience full of tension, contradiction, shame, laughter and violence hidden under the mask of norms, customs and family rituals.

The show is about puberty in a reality that obsessively regulates gender, sexuality and social roles, and at the same time does not give language to talk about desires, fears and discord. The world of adults — parents, authorities, figures of “normality” — does not support heroines, but projects their own frustrations, incomplishments and obsessions onto them. The family becomes a space of oppression: a place where taboos are not broken, but preserved and passed on.

White Marriage in this realization strongly emphasizes the queer potential of Różewicz's text — broadly understood as a critique of normativity, binary divisions and stable identities. Gender is not given here, but played out, imposed, negotiated and challenged. The decision to have male roles played by women further strengthens the performance dimension of the play: it reveals the conventionality of roles, the theatricality of power relations and the fragility of social constructions of femininity and masculinity.

Bianka's rebellion and Paulinka's pragmatism are not simple survival strategies — they are borderline gestures, underpinned by irony, despair and the desire to go beyond the existing order. White marriage offers no unequivocal diagnoses or moral judgments. Instead, it raises questions: about who has the right to define identity, what price is paid for “normality” and whether growing up must mean agreeing to the world as it is.

It is an artistically radical spectacle, strongly corporeal, balancing between the grotesque and the tragic. It is also aimed at a young audience — one that is not looking for ready-made answers, but space for thought, confrontation and discord.

Performances with subtitles in English

Performances with English subtitles

Translation of the performance description into English

A show for viewers from the age of 16

Joanna Puzynya-Chojka Main Prize “for the realization in a contemporary form in a clear and dynamic way of a performance addressing the problem of violence regardless of gender and the theme of personality formation, as well as for excellent team and individual performance” — VII Festival of the New Theatre in Rzeszów — LIX Rzeszow Theatre Meetings (2021)

licensor — Association of Authors ZAiKS, Warsaw

610th premiere of the Polish Theatre in Wrocław

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage and Sport

The play took part in the VII Competition for the Staging of Old Works of Polish Literature “Living Classics”