The stimulation of a nine-day theatre festival—some might say overstimulation—provides an exhilarating emotional elevator ride up and down, and up and down, from the highs of, “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this!” to the lows of, “Uh, er, hmm…I’ve never seen anything like this.”
At its core, though, an event like Kraków’s annual Divine Comedy Festival exposes audiences to a range of stage work—in this case, the best of Poland’s from the previous year or so—that can stagger the senses and recharge the imagination. Which seems largely to have been the effect on the U.S. delegation of theatre professionals I embedded with, courtesy of the Baltimore-based Center for International Theatre Development.
It sometimes takes absorbing a radically different aesthetic to reignite one’s own, as Mei Ann Teo, artistic leader of New York’s Ping Chong and Company, discovered. Modern Polish theatre has evolved a process unlike an American tradition that revolves around the writer: Here the director is essentially also playwright, which leads to more inventive playfulness with dramatic structure but can also weaken coherent storytelling.
“This is bringing me back to my artistry, and that has been really hard to do in the American theatre,” Teo told me. “I’ve been blown away by the imagination of form.”
The effect on Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Village Theatre, a musical theatre company in Issaquah and Everett, Washington, has also proved profound.
“It feels like a wake-up slap to say, ‘Trust more, risk more,’” Immerwahr observed after a week of delegation sit-downs with counterparts in the Polish theatre world. “The intellectual stimulation of being in conversation here with other arts thinkers and leaders has made me stop and think and have hard discussions about the theatre I make in America.”
Given the multiplying arts crises around the world—funds becoming ever scarcer, numerous governments moving in authoritarian directions—a sense of embattlement has suffused this year’s festival, particularly among the foreign visitors. (A more liberal ruling party took over in Warsaw late last year, making Poland one of the world’s enviable bright spots.) At a symposium on Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, for instance, festival curators from South Africa, Lithuania, and Egypt used cautionary language to characterize the current climate for making art.
“It is very difficult to find optimism in this moment,” said Thobile Maphanga, curator of a dance festival in Durban, South Africa, and one of the festival jurors this year. Maphanga contended, though, that challenging times do not signal defeat for creative thinkers: “The hopelessness is not a stopper. It’s an engine.”
Reflecting the complicated political environment, the gears of Divine Comedy’s 2024 engine seem to grind both toward joy and despair. Over the last several days, I’ve felt the pendulum swing in the city’s theatres from effervescent comedy to unrelenting bleakness.
For example, The Revenge, a chestnut Polish farce, was revived vibrantly by director Michał Zadara, who transferred its mechanics from the 19th century to the 21st; across town, an adaptation by director Remigiusz Brzyk of The Peasants, an early 20th-century novel by Nobel Prize winner Władysława Reymont, portrayed the bitter, internecine struggles of women in an unforgiving Polish backwater.
Then there was the wild card entry, the head-scratching The Golden Records, in which director Mateusz Pakuła created a space story that was, well, just plain spacey. Set in a NASA boardroom in 1976, the play depicts astronomer Carl Sagan leading a debate over the global artifacts to be encoded on the Voyager I and II interstellar probes. The ensuing shenanigans, though, are less concerned with extraterrestrial life than extramarital sex, with the astrophysicists inclined to break into karaoke-caliber versions of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Okay then.
By contrast, the productions of The Revenge and The Peasants reflected a more traditionalist reliance on linear narrative, and underlined some smart, variegated programming by festival director Bartosz Szydłowski. The Peasants came across in Brzyk’s brutally vivid staging as a stark indictment of cold village life, dominated by a rigid Catholic Church—and, perhaps, giving a rationale for the Communist era that would follow soon enough.
Zadara, in particular, found in his updating of The Revenge a lucidly accessible context for the classic setup of young lovers who find their way to each other over seemingly impossible odds. And actor Maciej Stuhr had a captivating comic presence in the central role of a reluctant hit man.
For many of the American visitors, the festival, which ends on Saturday, seemed to serve as a palate cleanser, allowing them to think of their own work with new enthusiasm. As Immerwahr admitted, “There have been moments watching the plays that caused me to reflect on recent productions I have done and to go, ‘Oh, I should have been thinking about that.’ ”
He paused and remembered a remark he’d heard from another attendee, Tamilla Woodard, chair of the acting program at Yale’s Geffen School of Drama. Recounted Immerwahr, “She said, ‘The festival is like having your windshield wipers turned on.’”
Peter Marks (he/him) was the Washington Post theatre critic for 21 years.
