Ferdydurke (review)

Ferdydurke. By Witold Gombrowicz. Adapted by Allen J. Kuharski. Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr, La MaMa E.T.C., New York. 10 November 2001.

Two strands dominate Polish theatre tradition: the poetic, sacred strand, exemplified by nineteenth-century Romantic playwrights such as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki; and the grotesque, satiric strand, exemplified by twentieth-century playwrights such as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Slawomir Mrozæek. The Polish theatre practitioner best known in the United States, Jerzy Grotowski, brought the first tradition into the twentieth century by adapting the works of the Polish Romantics and making the theatre itself a place where something "sacred" took place. A figure far less well known in this country but tremendously influential in his native land, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) embodied the second tradition—the tradition of the grotesque—in his novels, diary, and plays. Gombrowicz, who lived in self-imposed exile in Argentina and France for thirty years, wrote scathingly satirical works that might be called absurdist, were it not for the fact that many of them predated absurdism. Among them was his 1937 novel Ferdydurke, which concerns a thirty-year-old writer who is kidnapped by a former teacher and sent back to high school. In a joint production, two theatre companies from Lublin, Poland—Provisorium and Kompania—bring the hilarity, satire, and grotesquerie of this novel to the stage, using a highly physical, extreme form of comic acting that is nonetheless akin to that in the seriously sacred theatre of Grotowski.

Ferdydurke, a nonsense word in Polish meaning something like "fiddle-faddle," celebrates the adolescent in all of us. The production opens with Joseph, played by Witold Mazurkiewicz (who also co-directed, along with Janusz Oprynski), sitting on a bench. He is wearing a suit, and appears dignified; soon, however, he is picking things off his head and out of his nose and then wiping his fingers on his jacket. He is joined by two schoolboys in uniform—the bullying Mientus (Jaroslaw Tomica) and the virtuous Siphon (Michal Zgiet)—both of whom he eyes rapaciously. The three characters wordlessly enact a kind of homoerotic quarrel, grunting and making comically ugly faces at each other until their teacher, Professor Pimko (Jacek Brzezinski), joins them, placing a long desk in front of the bench and turning the set into a schoolroom.

Professor Pimko proceeds to indoctrinate them in the beauties of Latin declensions and the Romantic poetry of Juliusz Slowacki. "Great poetry, being great and being poetry, cannot help but enrapture us," Pimko bellows pedantically. "But I don't understand," Mientus bravely speaks up, "how I can be enraptured when I'm not enraptured!" The climax of this section of the play occurs when Mientus and Siphon—who have been quarreling over whether boys should be called "guys" or "lads"—have a duel of grimaces, in which they fight solely by making grotesque faces and gestures at each other. Joseph escapes this school and goes to his lodgings, where he voyeuristically watches a bedtime conversation between his landlord and landlady, Mr. and Mrs. Young (Zgiet and Brzezinski), whom we see only as two pairs of naked legs in a window frame. Later Joseph meets up with Mientus and runs away to the country, where Mientus falls violently in love with a stableboy (Zgiet), with whom he attempts to fraternize, but who only understands that upper-class intellectual types like Mientus and Joseph are extremely peculiar.

The four actors in the production perform at an exceptionally high level of energy and with extraordinary precision. Two of the actors (Tomica and Zgiet) worked with Gardzienice, another Polish alternative theatre troupe from the Lublin area, whose work is heavily influenced by Grotowski and is physical in a way that we seldom see in American theatre. In addition, they and actor and co-director Mazurkiewicz worked in the professional puppet theatre before quitting to form their own company, so it is not surprising that a puppet-theatre aesthetic informs all the performances here. The actors' movements, gestures...