Tadeusz Rozewicz: Playwriting as Collage

Playwriting as Cola g e Daniel C. Gerould After October, 1956, when Poland gained greater independence from the Soviet Union, socialist realism died a swift death and the avant-garde in drama almost immediately became the mainstream. Everything that was new and experimental was acclaimed; Beckett, Ionesco, and the theatre of the absurd-previously banned as Western decadence--struck a particularly responsive chord and were quickly assimilated. By the early 1960's the Polish theatre had the most exciting and varied repertory in all of Europe and a group of talented young Polish playwrights, headed by Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rozewicz, were already producing original works of their own. Totally accepted by the public and with a state-supported theatre at its disposal, Polish avant-garde drama had won the battle against realism and its restrictive forms and was now obliged to seek other barriers to rebel against if it was to renew itselfand not become routine. In order to remain avant-garde, the creative playwright must go beyond the reigning mode of drama, not merely repeat its formulas. Such has been the position of Tadeusz Rozewicz, a highly idiosyncratic writer who has carried. the rejection of conventional theatre to its logical extreme by challenging the basic conventions of theatre that make its existence possible. In Birth Rate, which he simply calls "The Biography of a Play for the Theatre," the playwright pits himself against the very nature of drama. Throughout his career Rozewicz has disputed the authority of forms. Born in 1921, a member of the doomed generation that came of age in 1939, the young author was a soldier in a guerrilla unit during the last 63 years of the Nazi occupation of Poland. His first important literary works, published shortly after the war, were poems that exposed literature as a lie and attacked both art and artifice. A short-story writer and poet as well as dramatist, Rozewicz has constantly sought to obliterate all distinctions and limitations of genre and form. Deliberately striving for maximum impurity, he is an anti-artist who collects debris and creates "junk art" out of scraps of quotations, newspaper clippings, shopping lists, and even bureaucratic documents. Rozewicz's technique of collage and assemblage effectively serves his vision of the contemporary world as a colossal trash heap. In his first play, The Card File (1960), the playwright celebrates the anonymous man. The generic, nameless hero lies in bed throughout the entire play contemplating his own hand and opening and closing his fingers. Passers-by-fragments of his past, present, and future-wander across the stage and question this modern everyman about his life and commitments. Interrogated by these insistent voices, the unwilling protagonist asserts, "I like the little toe on my left foot better than I do all of humanity." By remaining totally passive and irresponsible, he attempts to resist all pressures from the outside world. Rozewicz's works are marked by a deep suspicion of abstractions, ideologies, and principles, particularly those forcibly imposed on human beings in the name of mankind. A crucial difference emerges between the individual and humanity in the abstract. The poet mistrusts words and seeks truth in nakedness, in the bare biological facts of the human organism and the world of things which surrounds it. For Rozewicz, the only verities are concrete. A montage of bits and scraps, misplaced emotions , stray characters, lost in a world of fluid time and space, The Card File is without dramatic action and refuses to fit into the standard theatrical mold. As Rozewicz continues his struggle to write plays in the face of the growing impossibility of such an enterprise, stage directions replace dialogue; the author is forced to abandon writing normal plays, even avant-garde ones. Instead of literary texts, he produces arguments with the theatre and scenarios in which playwright and performer are cocreators . In The Interrupted Act (1964), Rozewicz makes a play out ofhis dissatisfaction with all existing dramatic forms. The conflict in the drama is between the idea of the play and the impossibility of its execution. Remarks by the author, personal intrusions, theoretical deliberations, and polemics with other theorists of the theatre interrupt and subvert the play...