ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author outlines a significant connection between Pawel Demirski and Dorota Maslowska through the preoccupation with painful pasts and difficult histories that elude historicist grasp and classical dramaturgy. As in Polish-Speaking Romanians, Maslowska hedges between satire and parody that invites the audience to laugh both at and with the characters of the Mother and her neighbour, and the morbid banalities of lived realities under neoliberalism make way for memories of painful pasts. Both writers draw attention to the struggle over memory as opposed to memory’s simple invocation, and the ways in which memorialising practices have been in ideological sympathy with advertising industries, neoliberal consumerism, and imagined urban utopias. While Demirski tests the elasticity of democratic systems, Dorota Maslowska drills down into the affective qualities of lived experience under neoliberalism. Both playwrights are interested in the ways historical discourses shape the present and fail to offer alternative modes for the future.
