Were I to recite in full detail all the elements which compose the play White Marriage I would still not convey its extraordinary quality….

It is at once satire, fantasy, poem….

What is pictured is bourgeois society (with peasantlike underpinnings), especially in regard to sexual relationships. The young are kept uninformed of such matters; most of the married women have been subjected to unions with men who treat them as properties. The men chase their female servants—cooks, maids and other such—like brutes. They reduce these women to wildfowl and they display little warmth to or understanding of their daughters. Thus, on the one hand we observe the silly decorum of pseudo-cultivated society (piano playing, amateur theatricals, poetry recitals); on the other, the manners and morals of the barnyard.

One might suppose, then, that all this would be transformed into a sort of women's lib parable, an earnestly fanciful denunciation of the old-time Polish bourgeoisie. Instead, along with hilariously phallic humor, deft stabs of ridicule, the play is suffused by a very special delicacy and tenderness, a kind of comic benevolence, a purity which dissolves derision and dispels any suspicion of preachment. There is an insinuating mockery here but it always remains joyous, sane and surprisingly touching. At certain moments a somber note is struck to provide a framework for and a contrast to the general airiness. The loveliness of both adolescent girls [the main characters] bathes the crudities inherent in some of the proceedings with a light which turns all to serene beauty.