Princess Ivona (review)

Of the four most famous twentieth-century Polish playwrights—Stanis¬aw Ignacy Witkiewicz, S¬awomir Mrozæek, Tadeusz Rozæewicz, and Witold Gombrowicz—Gombrowicz (1904-1969), despite being considered canonical in Western Europe as well as in Poland, is probably the least well-known in America. Hence the east coast professional premiere of Gombrowicz's first play, Princess Ivona, occurred in the United States for the first time in 2002—ten years after its west coast professional premiere, thirty-seven years after its first production in Western Europe, forty-five years after its first professional Polish production, and sixty-four years after its publication. Yet in fact, Gombrowicz is finally experiencing something of a minor renaissance in America: his classic novel Ferdydurke appeared in a new translation in 2000, and a Polish theatre company, Provisorium/Kompania, mounted an extensive tour of the States with an adaptation of that novel in 2001-2002.

Ivona, which was written just before Ferdydurke, is considered an important forerunner of the theatre of the absurd. Theatre Exile, one of several exciting young theatre companies in Philadelphia, has given Gombrowicz a premiere to be proud of with a production that pays homage to the tradition of the absurd, but it also demonstrates the distinctiveness of the playwright's worldview. Unlike the French playwrights who succeeded him, Gombrowicz's absurdism is employed not to point out the emptiness of modern life or the incomprehensibility of the universe, but to observe the absurdity of everyday human behavior in all its triviality and shamefulness.

Ivona is a kind of anti-fairy tale. A handsome and sophisticated prince meets a commoner and decides to marry her, not because of her beauty or cleverness, or even because he recognizes her inner goodness, but seemingly out of perversity—she is homely, hardly says a word, and when she does speak, she is maddeningly obscure. At first the courtiers and royal family laugh at the prince's capriciousness and Ivona's utter charmlessness, but soon they begin to resent her inability or unwillingness to play the social games by which the court (and allegorically, all society) functions. Ivona's lack of concern for social niceties not only goads the others into hostility against her but also somehow makes the other characters feel guilty about their own inner selves, which they had hitherto carefully guarded against revealing to the outside world. For example, the queen begins to fear that the sentimental poetry she writes has been found out, and the king starts to brood about the seamstress whom he had seduced and who later committed suicide. In the end, Ivona produces so much uneasiness in the whole court that everyone contrives plots to murder her, the most absurd of which—serving her a bony fish she will choke on—ironically succeeds.

Theatre Exile's production, directed with great panache by David Disbrow, who previously directed the same group's production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, brings out the comic elements of the script without neglecting the subtle insights into human psychology that Gombrowicz's play makes. Although Disbrow could have chosen to emphasize the fairy-tale setting more, perhaps by garbing the characters in period costumes and using a set with, say, crenelations and a moat, he and his production team have instead elected to emphasize the play's universality by employing a set consisting of plain, painted flats and clothing the actors in contemporary dress. This choice, by juxtaposing a medieval institution with a modern setting, not only further accentuates the absurdity of the depicted world but also underscores the point that the game-playing Ivona's presence exposes still exists today. Although Gombrowicz (like his compatriot Mrozæek) was a playwright intensely interested in the mechanisms of power, his artistic preoccupations were always more closely focused on personal power games (rather than, say, political ones) that people engage in with each other. Gombrowicz believed people's personalities were always changing in relation...