| The Witnesses
A play by Tadeusz Rozewicz
7:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 1
at the Irish Classical Theater, 625 Main Street, Buffalo.
preceded at 5:00 p.m. by a talk by
Prof. Tamara Trojanowska of the University of Toronto on
"Rozewicz: The Playwright as Witness and Satirist."
and by a
Reception
following the talk
To reserve a place for the talk, reception and play send $20 to the Club
c/o Dr. W. Bolanowska, 17 Pullman Ave., Kenmore, 14217 (tel: 876-7181; boland@eaglmail.com).
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Tadeusz Rozewicz
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In staging The Witnesses, a play by Tadeusz Rozewicz, one of the giants of Polish postwar literature, the Irish Classical Theater is providing the Western New York public with a rare opportunity to see how a writer of his caliber, living under conditions where ideas cannot be expressed freely, can nonetheless communicate some of those ideas to the theater frequenting public. To achieve this Rozewicz created a play of three at first sight unrelated parts. These can be enjoyed at two levels, one, whose text is seemingly transparent and acceptable to the censors, the other, is a sub-text which requires some insight and reflection, but one which provides those willing to listen for the meaning between the lines, a feeling of secrets shared and a riveting intellectual experience.
Sunday evening performances of the play, the production of which is co-sponsored by the Polish Arts Club of Buffalo, the Kosciuszko Foundation and Ingram Micro, will continue at 7:00 p.m. through April 8 at the Andrews Theater, 625 Main Street.
As the audiences riotous laughter clearly evidenced on opening night, the Irish Classical Theater’s gifted actors/directors, Paul Todaro and Michelle Gigante, were able to use very effectively the playwrights comic lines. These are most evident in the first of the play's three parts, each succeeding part becoming longer that the previous one. With each, the play becomes more of a surrealist comedy provoking thought and reflection.
As a special gesture in support of the production, the Polish Arts Club of Buffalo has invited Prof. Tamara Trojanowska of the University of Toronto, a specialist in Slavic Languages and Literatures, to give a talk on Tadeusz Rozewicz: the Playwright as Witness and Satirist at the Andrews Theater at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday April 1, this to be followed by a reception and, at 7:00 p.m., by a performance of the play. Those interested in booking place for the joint events should phone 876-7181.
Rozewicz, who had his first poems published in 1938, was, during the Second World War, a soldier - like his brother - in Poland's underground army. Unlike his brother, who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, he survived the war. The five year long German occupation had been utterly brutal, a time where random street roundups meant one might - for no reason at all - find oneself on a westward Germany-bound train on ones way to becoming a slave laborer. That without even being able to let one's family know why one had not shown up for supper. It was a time when six of Poland's 36 million citizens lost their life, when most of its cities were destroyed and Polish land was used to construct Nazi concentration camps.
Michelle Gigante and Paul Todaro
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In 1945, the Red Army brought "liberation." But what followed was an imposed Communist regime and years of Stalinist terror. Again people disappeared, some on of trains moving eastward towards Siberian Gulags, others interred.
Then, Stalin died and in Poland, the regime, fearful of widespread unrest, turned to Wladyslaw Gomulka, a veteran Communist leader who having himself been thrown in jail on trumped-up charges during the Stalinist period, had some empathy for fellow Poles and their miserable and uncertain lives. In a famous speech, he criticized past mistakes and promised economic and other reforms. At last, there was to be some normalcy, life was to become a little more comfortable. Rozewicz alludes to this in the subtitle he gave to the play: Our little stabilization.
The play's first part is a poem - declaimed by the two actors in a way you are not likely to have ever heard a poem declaimed before. It's hilarious. Already in the first hundred, or so, words Rozewicz remarks on the change in climate, stating
"we again have something
"resembling poetry"
and follows it immediately with what will become a recurring refrain: "we cross our legs" - for the first time in years, one can sit back and relax. Throughout the play and its gaiety, however darker moments surface. At times the characters suddenly, though for only briefly, develop doubts:
"you know I am a bit afraid
"I'm afraid I may lose
"that something ...
"and things will not get back to normal"
In part two, we are amused by the high spirited banter of a husband and wife, yet here too a darker side intrudes - at one point the wife, looking at reality with unshielded eyes emits a cri de coeur "I can't live like this." The moment passes, the banter is resumed. Yet at the end of the second part, the husband recounts a dark, gruesome vision of his own - but the wife, engaged in her morning exercises, pays not the slightest heed. Are we all destined to own mental universes untouched by the surrounding reality?
It is in the third part, the most surrealistic, that the sub-text comes into its own. Two man, friends, sit apart on an otherwise deserted terrace. As they discuss this and that, one sees in the middle distance a moving mass which is approaching. Its nature is uncertain. A body, a victim of a traffic accident, a dog, a man, a log, a seal? It's not clear. It moves closer and closer, it expires, eventually a foul smell emanates from it. It decomposes. The men on the terrace do their best to ignore it, yet it dominates their thoughts and, intermittently, their conversation.
Interestingly, dramatic critics, writing at the time, claimed the mass to be a human and interpreted the unwillingness of the play's protagonists to face this fact, to ascertain who it was, to extend any help, rather than just siting as if stuck to their chairs, as evidence of a callousness caused by all they had been through. But the theater going public may have viewed the something, the mass, the stinking what-its-name as a metaphor for communism, for the regime. "What are the authorities doing? Where is public opinion," cries one of the protagonists, "It's the second half of the twentieth century ... and nobody cares." "It's a scandal," the other comments, "that no one has cleared away this carcass."
Although forty years have passed and we live in a world far removed, the play's commentary continues to be relevant today. How many people view their governments as a "stinking mess" and why is no one doing anything about them?
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