Marciniak was born in 1984. She graduated in European Studies and Drama Studies at the Jagiellonian University and in Drama Direction at the State Drama School in Kraków. She debuted in 2010 at the Polish Theatre in Bielsko-Biała with Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The New Deliverance / Nowe Wyzwolenie. Before that, she mastered the art of directing under the tutelage of such experienced directors as Anna Augustynowicz and Paweł Miśkiewicz. She has already realized a number of well-received plays at venues in Wrocław, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Wałbrzych, Koszalin, Kraków, Kielce, Katowice and Bydgoszcz. She has been working with the dramatist Michał Buszewicz for a few years. Apart from directing, Marciniak deals with theatrical education – she leads workshops for children living near Kraków.
Jelinek Dances
Marciniak is the author of Amateurs / Amatorki, a celebrated, award-winning play based on the prose of the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. In this play, together with the choreographer Dominika Knapik, Marciniak toys with various theatrical conventions, ironically combining features of a musical and a romantic comedy. The critics deemed this play one of the most important of 2012. Agnieszka Kochanowska wrote what follows in a review that was published on the dwutygodnik.com portal:
This is a great performance, in which the actors are strikingly precise and disciplined. Ewelina Marciniak knows how to work with actors, how to get their trust, how to bring out their potential. This may be seen especially in the case of Katarzyna Dałek, a new actress in the theatre’s troupe who created a unique role, which is quite surprising given that earlier she hadn’t been acting all that well at the Wybrzeże Theatre. Marciniak’s consistent yet intuitive direction surprises the viewers with unexpected theatrical signs created as if from nothing, and leads the actors into unexpected places.
In interviews, Marciniak emphasizes that she admires the language of Elfriede Jelinek’s prose and promises to return to theatrical work on the Austrian’s writing. "I believe that when we read a book we fall in love with the characters. That’s why I try to make us fall in love with a given play. We accompany the characters and come to love their dreams, which are simple, however, we can relate to this simplicity", said Marciniak in the Dziennik Bałtycki daily newspaper..
The play won the Main Award at the 48th edition of the KONTRAPUNKT Showcase of Theatres of Small Forms and the Special Honorary Award of the City of Gdańsk for “play of the year”. Amateurs was also appreciated by foreign audiences – it was presented with success in Strasbourg, amongst others.
A New Reading of Molier
At the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Koszalin, Marciniak worked on a text by the German dramatist Roland Schimmelpfennig. The The Woman Before / Kobieta z przeszłości play, in which Katarzyna Zawadzka plays the lead role, was very warmly received by audiences. Jacek Cieślak commented in the daily Rzeczpospolita:
This performance is intimate, but precisely prepared and original. It has high potential for games with the audience, which is provided by the main topic – the temptation of romance. This temptation is seemingly innocent, but in the end, it turns out to ruin lives. An unrolled roll of paper is attached to one of the walls. The paper from this roll forms a carpet on the stage, on which a wife and husband walk, carrying the weight of a 19-year-long marriage. Their life is dull and boring. Meanwhile, the titular woman (Katarzyna Zawadzka) exercises her charm from a small couch standing in the cramped auditorium. The play’s strength lies in the dialogues and the emotions and tensions that arise between the actors, and between the actors and the audience.
At the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz, Marciniak prepared a new interpretation of Molier’s The Miser / Skąpiec. In this play, she asks about the value of money, transactions, desires, debts, greed, and the point of ownership.
A scene from the play The Miser / Skąpiec, direction: Ewelina Marciniak, photo: Magda Hueckel / The Hieronim Konieczka Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz Anna Tarnowska wrote what follows in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza:
The play itself is insolent, but in a positive way. Just as there’s not enough clothes to cover the actors’ bodies, there are no understatements and delusions that economy is something more than what it is. The language of the play is its strong point. Michał Buszewicz practically re-wrote The Miser. He rephrased the elaborate, baroque sentences into contemporary language, nevertheless retaining Molier’s courtly style.
Marciniak worked as a guest director at the Stary Theatre in Kraków (2012). Her play The Death and Resurrection of the World / Śmierć i zmarwychwstanie świata was the Polish pre-premiere of one of the plays written by the young German playwright Nis-Momme Stockmann.
Peter Pan and the Social Cause
Peter Pan / Piotruś Pan, photo: Magda Hueckel / The Współczesny Theatre in Szczecin The Buszewicz/Marciniak duo also realized a swashbuckling tale about Peter Pan in the fairytale land of Neverland at the Współczesny Theatre in Szczecin. However, the authors warn that:
The fairytale convention shouldn’t shroud the important issues in the story of Peter Pan, which draw much attention. After all, we're dealing with running away from home to a very far away place, where you have to choose between the half-wild world of the Lost Boys and the ruthless world of the pirates, who take on the features of celebrities in the play. More and more, Neverland starts to resemble a world to which a child escapes when rebelling against the constraints of upbringing. We will see less and less of the worlds we know from other fairy tales, which we thoughtlessly grew accustomed to as grown-ups and consider the only existing models. It mostly depends on the parents what path their child will choose. A child too strongly controlled might reject everything it has learned at home, seeing that this knowledge doesn’t correspond to the world that surrounds us.
