Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Performance Review: The Madman and the Nun

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.1996.0099

1086-332X

Helena M White,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Reviewed by: The Madman and the Nun by Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz) Helena M. White The Madman and the Nun. By Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz), Impossible Industrial Action Theater, Baltimore. 21 April 1996. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Donna Sherman and Shannon Hepburn in the Impossible Industrial Action Theater production of Witkacy’s The Madman and the Nun, directed by Toni Tsendeas. Photo: Joe Kohl. In a press release, Impossible Industrial Action Theater, an independent theatre company currently in residence at the Baltimore Theatre Project, pledged its dedication to developing “singular production styles for plays which are selected for both their strength of ideas and their heightened theatricality.” The company’s production of The Madman and the Nun, written in 1922 by the Polish avant-garde playwright, Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz), falls easily into this category. Witkacy has been widely translated in the United States, but productions of his plays remain scarce. In a program note, director Toni Tsendeas refers to Witkacy as a playwright whose theatre enjoyed a brief rediscovery in the 1960s, yet remains a virtual stranger to the American theatre. “It is time for another rediscovery,” Tsendeas continues, “and IIA [Impossible Industrial Action] Theater is particularly suited to the task.” This slightly cavalier statement catches the spirit of the youthful IIA company—and hints at the problems with this [End Page 514] production. Any attempt to expand American audiences’ experience with theatre by doing Witkacy is risky business, but for the IIA company it was apparently a risk well worth taking. The production departed from realism before the play even started. The set, designed by Robb Bauer, represented a cell in an insane asylum—but one that could have come straight out of a nightmare. The proportions were out of whack—a normal-sized patient’s bed was dwarfed by huge walls and an enormous slanted door that later comically opened and closed with a loud groan. A large grate was projected onto one of the walls. The director mixed sounds with the truncated pieces of dialogue to suggest the chaos and fragmentation of the surrounding world. Eventually the patient, a poet named Walpurg (an allusion to the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe’s Faust) rose from his bed, and attention shifts to the more intense and abstract workings of Walpurg’s mind, workings he cannot turn off. The mental tortures that Walpurg often refers to as his “infernal machine” inspired videos (designed by Thomas E. Cole) that were projected on the walls to accompany Walpurg’s soliloquies, “translating” the contents of his racing mind onto the screen in abstract, fast-moving images, intercut with brief tranquil moments of sexual release captured through images of open spaces and colors of remarkable beauty. This marriage of text with image was not only a tour de force, but served to evoke the metaphysical consciousness that interested Witkacy by distancing the spectator from any tangible associations with the real world. At one point, one of Witkacy’s own abstract paintings appeared in projection, reminding those in the audience familiar with his work that Walpurg’s struggles against confinement reflect the playwright’s own nightmares and obsessions. Less successful were the more literal translations of text into video images—for example, the projection of moving cogs and wheels to illustrate Walpurg’s recurring reference to a machine inside his head. The question of whether to provide some tangible context for Walpurg’s inner problems or to keep his world as abstract as possible in order to adhere to Witkacy’s theory of “pure form” apparently presented Tsendeas with some dilemmas. It remains a fascinating challenge for any director to try to apply Witkacy’s theories to the actual performance of his plays. Perhaps Robert Wilson’s [End Page 515] dream-like pieces best capture Witkacy’s descriptions of how he thought his ideas would actually “look” on stage. How Wilson would handle Witkacy’s texts, however, is another question. In The Madman and the Nun, the text is certainly abundant and clearly retains its traditional function. Tsendeas tried to make the play’s language a part of the “musical score” by treating it as a group of...