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“Sure, it's the function of my life!” he exclaims in Polish, the English translation flashing on a pair of tv screens. “I don’t play a president on the barricades. I'm that president!”
The viewers giggles and guffaws all through “A Play About President Zelensky,” a two-hour vaudeville directed by Piotr Sieklucki that has been hailed as one in all Poland’s greatest performs of 2022. Erstwhile comic Volodymyr Zelensky is now lionized as an inspirational chief throughout a lot of the globe. Right here, as performed by a compact look-alike named Michal Felek Felczak, he’s additionally the president subsequent door, a determine not above slightly roasting. Within the play, he spars with a double for Vladimir Putin despatched to taunt him, debates historical past with the ghost of Rasputin and geese for canopy each time an earsplitting bombing raid sounds.
The piece is without doubt one of the extra robustly satirical entries in Krakow’s annual Divine Comedy Worldwide Theatre Competition, a bustling, nine-day theater marathon. It's curated by inventive director Bartosz Szydlowski, a passionate dynamo who, since 2007, has been bringing performs from throughout Poland to its second-largest metropolis. Lots of Krakow’s playhouses open their doorways to the form of rule-breaking dramas which are revered on this theater-loving nation of 38 million. A Poland that of late has absorbed tens of millions of refugees from neighboring Ukraine — and a Poland whose theater folks, many additionally activists, are discovering quite a bit to say concerning the close by cataclysms.
American theater investigates all method of pressing considerations, however in issues of struggle, the discourse routinely happens at a geographical take away. With a rustic in flames throughout Poland’s japanese border, I traveled to Krakow final month to erase a few of that distance. I wished to see how artwork is performed on the outskirts of a fight zone — what a struggle in progress and the miseries it ignites do to a creative self-discipline that should exist vitally within the second. How do you make artwork when the world is coming aside?
In searching for solutions, I wasn’t disillusioned. The productions, all besides one subtitled in English, launched me to a theater world struggling starkly with how to answer the ills convulsing Western societies. In Poland, it appears, one doesn’t go to the theater to flee the world; Broadway by comparability is a soft-focus fairy story land. Right here a lot if not all of the work appears to pull audiences to the window and shout, “Take a look at what is going on!” Not for nothing was the play introduced by Szydlowski himself in his city-funded theater within the Nowa Huta neighborhood — as soon as a mannequin socialist Krakow suburb — titled “Worry and Distress 2022.”
“The competition is to provide this mild to artists,” Szydlowski says. “I exploit this platform to announce the significance of Polish theater.”
“In just about each present, the artists are coming collectively round an inquiry, and you are feeling as an viewers that you simply’re being invited into this inquiry,” says Howard Shalwitz, former inventive director of D.C’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre and a longtime advocate for theater from this a part of the world. (His plans in 2014 for a Woolly competition of avant-garde performs from Moscow collapsed after Russia seized Crimea.) “It’s not that we by no means really feel that within the States, nevertheless it’s so constant in Poland. And so it provides you a special feeling about the way you relate to the folks round you within the theater. The area feels extra public.”
It was at Shalwitz’s suggestion that I got here to Krakow. Below the auspices of the Heart for Worldwide Theatre Growth, he introduced a 20-member American theater delegation there final month to see the performs and discuss to members of the Polish theater group. The contingent included Maria Goyanes, Shalwitz’s successor at Woolly; Philadelphia-based efficiency artist Jennifer Kidwell (“Underground Railroad Sport”); and director Liesl Tommy, Tony-nominated for “Eclipsed” and director of the film “Respect.” The Baltimore-based CITD, based by Philip Arnoult, fosters ties with administrators and different artists in Central and Japanese Europe.
Already, actors and administrators from Ukraine, amongst a number of the estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians who've resettled in Poland, are being built-in into the Polish theater panorama: Three late entries to the competition had been performs concerning the struggle developed and carried out by Ukrainians. They adopted a dictum that pervades the theater world right here — that the message is infinitely extra essential than linear formality.
This was definitely true of “I Really feel Mint for You,” a play by two Ukrainian actresses who escaped devastated japanese Ukraine and now shelter within the southern Polish metropolis of Sosnowiec. The title is colloquial and divulges solely in probably the most indirect phrases what the actors search to painting: the aggressive however loving relationship they forge, as their homeland lies in ruins. A photograph montage from bombed-out Ukrainian communities flashes on a display all through the episodic, 90-minute manufacturing, which culminates in a wrenching scene in English, throughout which one of many characters loses her composure. “Why folks die? Why folks die?” she bellows. “Why die? Why die? Why die?”
The work is uncooked, elusive, gripping, a deeply shifting brush with what I’d been searching for: artwork created viscerally, out of what was occurring throughout the border. At Krakow’s Nationwide Academy of Theatre Arts, Polish directing pupil Dominika Przybyszewska introduced a robust motion piece primarily based on Greek delusion that she titled “Promise Me There Will Be No Battle.”
“It’s very bodily,” one other pupil, Stanislaw Chludzinski, tells me of his emotions concerning the struggle, on a morning the American delegation visited the academy. “I'd say that everybody feels it deep down, that there's violence there. I've household there.”
These ties bind the 2 nations. “There are numerous Ukrainian artists attempting to work in Poland with no connections, who know no one,” says Wojtek Zralek-Kossakowski, a Polish inventive adviser to the actresses in “I Really feel Mint for You.”
The Ukrainian artists, he says, have acquired particular Polish Theater Institute grants to work in Sosnowiec and different cities. Theater in Poland is nearly totally authorities sponsored, with some inevitable political fallout. The proper-wing nationwide authorities is at odds with many within the inventive group, who rely on the nation’s extra liberal metropolis governments to help their work.
“There are only a few events I may be happy with my nation,” Zralek-Kossakowski provides, referring to the help. “That is one in all them.”
One of many actresses in “Mint,” Kateryna Vasiukova, says the adjustment was not simple. “I got here to Poland 9 months in the past,” she says. “I bear in mind how chilly it was, how scary, how unusual.”
“Mint” adhered to a notion of theater devoting extra consideration to unfettered expression than to construction. Antithetical to theater in New York or London, the director, not the playwright, tends to be answerable for a manufacturing’s intention, and which means. The rehearsal course of, Polish theater folks say, routinely begins with no script. It’s the subversive product of a nation that went by way of the devastation of World Battle II and got here out a special society, below Soviet domination.
“Something that's form of conventional, primarily based on a craft, the best way our grandfathers did it, that’s all obliterated,” says Michal Zadara, a Warsaw-based director who not too long ago spent a yr instructing at Swarthmore Faculty. “The individuals who had been doing theater after the struggle had been simply completely different folks than who had been doing it earlier than the struggle.”
The disruption of the traditional was no extra obvious than in a competition providing by 79-year-old director Krystian Lupa, a large of Polish theater. He's so averse to ceding management that in performances of his epic-length works, he sits at the back of the theater with a microphone, consistently interrupting with distracting noises and solutions for his actors. Over the PA system, the impact — perhaps intentional? — is akin to listening to the voice of God.
Within the ornate Slowacki Theatre, Lupa’s “Think about” unfolds over 5½ relentless hours. Impressed by John Lennon’s tune of therapeutic and pacifism, the play is a sprawling canvas, provoked by a problem that nags at Lupa: why an older era supposedly moved by “Think about” has didn't reside as much as its idealism. At one level deep into the night, one in all Lupa’s actors, a spectrally skinny Andrzej Klak, seizes on the event to blurt out a diatribe on dire present occasions.
“Can’t you see that 100,000 younger Russians are stationed on the Ukrainian border?” Klak declares. “These persons are able to die, to begin capturing. Will they ever notice how absurd that's, how horribly, monstrously silly and evil?”
It’s each a jolt and an illustration of Zadara’s statement: “You don’t care about something, aside from what you wish to say. And are you saying what you actually wish to say?”
Zadara’s personal entry within the competition leaves little question about what he needs to say. “Duty” is a refreshingly unadorned play about Syrian and different asylum seekers stopped by guards and held in limbo on the Belarus-Poland border. The 90-minute fact-based piece unfolds as if it had been a authorized continuing. On a set outfitted with folding tables, whiteboards and laptops, three extremely regarded Polish actors — Mateusz Janicki, Maja Ostaszewska and Barbara Wysocka — current a packed viewers on the Wyspianski Academy of Theatre Arts with proof of crimes towards humanity and violations of the Polish structure by the federal government.
The manufacturing is a requirement for an accounting of why these refugees are handled extra severely than, say, these fleeing the struggle in Ukraine. “Why is an individual’s authorized standing derived by the place they're coming from?” an actor asks, as images of migrants, trapped in freezing climate on the border, are projected onto a display.
For Szydlowski, who based the competition 15 years in the past, Zadara’s work has deep relevance. “I did consider I might handle to create a competition concerning the human situation in the present day,” he says. “I've to cope with the query of accountability. Proper now, you're obliged to be slightly extra accountable to others.”
A go to with Szydlowski to Nowa Huta, the huge residential district constructed by the Soviets within the Fifties as a group for iron staff, bore out his assertion. On the invitation of native leaders, Szydlowski created a theater there, Laznia Nowa, in 2005 in what had been a staff’ coaching middle. Within the ensuing years, he and his spouse, Malgorzata, a set designer, developed different initiatives, together with one he significantly wished to point out me: Dom Utopi (The Home of Utopia), a renovated former faculty, across the nook from his theater, reopened in 2021 as a residence for as much as 40 artists and their households.
Within the aftermath of the Russian invasion, Dom Utopi grew to become a short lived haven for Ukrainian actors and different artists. Many have moved on. “It’s nonetheless going to be a home of concepts,” Szydlowski says, as he escorts me by way of the Home of Utopia’s convention rooms and workshop areas and residences.
Concepts, due to Szydlowski and his competition, appear to waft over Krakow in December like drifting snowflakes. I’m left with admiration for a theater tradition so absorbed in a sober seek for reality. But in addition, it ought to be famous, not afraid to poke enjoyable at itself. In “A Play About President Zelensky,” the funniest character isn't the comedian-president however one wearing an elaborate Polish people costume, and performed by the director, Sieklucki, who takes selfies as he strolls a ravaged panorama dominated by a charred McDonald’s signal.
“I'm a Polish artist who got here to Ukraine that will help you folks,” he says. “And I wish to be praised for that!” The viewers erupts. It's, in reality, the largest snicker of the evening.
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