Witkacy's "The Madman and the Nun", dir. Hanna Bondarewska, photo by Magda Pinkowska
Dedicated to "all the madmen of the world" the play takes as its theme the tyranny of society over the individual. The author himself felt threatened by insanity - an expression of rebellious individuality - and the play may be considered an ironic portrait of the artist
Witkacy flamboyantly turns everything and everybody into the confusion between the sanity and madness. The play is a strikingly funny attack on both medicine and academia and man's futile attempt to control the "demons" of existence.
Written in 1923 and first staged in 1924, in "The Madman and the Nun" (the title of one of a painting exhibited in 1921), the creative personality becomes victim of cultural repression when science and state, abetted by religion, form a totalitarian alliance to bring about enforced happiness and social tranquility through psychiatric confinement.
Witkacy's decadent poet and drug addict, Walpurg, exemplifies the destiny of exceptional beings who are locked in padded cells and trapped in ever-widening circles of incarceration by body, family, and society. The Freudian psychiatrist Grün hopes to cure Walpurg by rendering him normal and restoring him to society lobotomized of the madness that constitutes his genius.
As the only way out of imprisonment, Walpurg seduces his nurse (the beautiful Sister Anna), murders one of his doctors, and hangs himself. Here Witkacy introduces a spectacular coup de theatre that cancels the seemingly inevitable tragic ending. Stepping over his own corpse lying on the floor, the handsome young Walpurg - an elegantly dressed dandy - enters the cell, bids farewell to his keepers, who are now locked up as insane, and goes off to town with Anna. Witkiewicz's favored device of the risen corpse violates the laws of both nature and conventional dramatic logic; the play subverts its own premises and calls into question the entire rational world that constructs madhouses.
In the double denouement of The Madman and the Nun Witkacy, incorporating Heisenberg's principle of complementarity and Bohr's uncertainty principle, plays bold theatrical tricks on the audience in order to dispose of the dead conventions of stage realism along with Walpurg's dead body. Witkacy's protest against psychiatric confinement anticipates strategies of the post-1968 avant-garde: creative madness, anarchic violence, liberating sexuality, and emancipation through dreams.
- Daniel Gerould
"The Madman and the Nun or, There is Nothing Bad Which Could Not Turn into Something Worse" by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), a short play in three acts and four scenes, set entirely in a "cell for raving maniacs" in a lunatic asylum.
Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was a playwright, novelist, painter, photographer and philosopher. "He created a theater of the absurd twenty years before Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. He himself was a living model of the avant-garde, advancing the frontiers of drama, fiction, aesthetics, philosophy and painting", writes Daniel Gerould.
The show runs from the 29-30 November 2011 and 1-18 December 2011 at the Mead Theatre Lab in Washington.
"The Madman and the Nun" written by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Translated by Daniel Charles Gerould. Directed and produced by: Hanna Bondarewska; Assistant Director: James Randle; Stage Manager: Adam Adkins; Set Design by Daniel Pinha; Costume Design by Jen Bevan; Lights by: Marianne Meadows; Sound and Visual by: David Crandall.
Participation in CultureCapital for Ambassador Theater is provided by a partnership between the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
Mead Theatre Lab
Ambassador Theatre International Cultural Center
916 GStreet NW
Washington, D.C.
Source: Polish Cultural Institute in New York