John Guare and Omar Sangare in 3 Kinds of Exile. Photo Credit: Kevin Thomas Garcia
U.S. playwright John Guare's new production, 3 Kinds of Exile, premieres in New York City on the 11th of June. The play is inspired by the lives of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, Polish actress Elżbieta Czyżewska and Czech filmmaker Karel Reisz.
The city that never sleeps gets a taste of Polish artists in exile with the new production by Tony-award winner John Guare. 3 Kinds of Exile takes communist Central Europe as its starting point, drawing on the three artists who gained acclaim in the late 20th century, in order to depict the tragic exiles that befell so many at the time. Guare is known for his comical yet merciless portrayals of human misery in plays including The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
It's not the first time that the actress Elżbieta Czyżewska inspires Guare. After her death in 2010, his homage to the Polish legend, Erased / Elzbieta, played at the Atlantic Theater Company. Czyżewska led an equally impressive career in Europe and the U.S. Known to Polish audiences for her roles in Nasfeter's Unloved (1965) and Wajda's Everything for Sale (1968), she first married well-known director Jerzy Skolimowski - recently in the public eye since his film Essential Killing was awarded special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2010. After their divorce, she married U.S. Pulitzer-recipient David Halberstam, a New York Times correspondent whose pointed criticism of the political situation in the People's Republic of Poland drove the couple out of Europe.
In spite of hardship and exile, Czyżewska continued her influential career in the U.S. Bogayevich's Anna (1987) was based on director-writer Agnieszka Holland's adaptation of her life, and she performed before the camera and theatre audiences throughout her life, notably in Costa-Gavras's Music Box (1989) and her Obie-winning role in the Mac Wellman play Crowbar. She received the Cultural Award of Merit from the Consul General at the New York Polish Consulate in 2005 for her career accomplishments.
In his review of the play in the New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes:
Czyzewska’s story begins in Poland, where she became its leading classical actress in the 1960s. By her early 20s she was a beloved, even worshiped figure. A photo projected on the curtains that frame the playing area reveals a gamin, minxlike beauty: a little bit Carey Mulligan, a little bit Penelope Tree. A career of seemingly boundless promise took an unforeseeable turn. At a party for a Polish production of Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” in which she played the Marilyn Monroe part (an ominous portent?), Czyzewska met David Halberstam, then a Warsaw correspondent for The New York Times. Thunderclap! They fell in love and were soon married. But Mr. Halberstam’s reporting rankled the Polish authorities, and he was expelled from the country. In America Czyzewska’s accent made it impossible for her to find stage or film roles. In exile she lost her identity, eventually lost her husband to divorce, and spent the rest of her life trying to find her equilibrium. The story of her decline is almost unremittingly bleak, full of missed chances and moments when her own intransigence or simple contrariness would torpedo what appeared to be a genuine break. (Mr. Guare at one point had to fire her from a role in a play he’d written specifically for her.) But it is also fascinating — featuring encounters with luminaries like William Styron and Meryl Streep and Elaine Stritch — and Mr. Guare has imbued it with the suspense and dynamism of a long, enthralling mystery story.
Guare includes the colourful journey of renowned writer Witold Gombrowicz, whose novel Trans-Atlantyk and play The Marriage were inspirations in the playwright's work. Having finished his studies in Paris in the late 1920s, Gombrowicz returned to Poland and received literary notoriety for his first novel, Ferdydurke. He sailed to South America as a journalist at the eve of the Second World War, then remained in Argentina for some 24 years. His work was banned in Poland for decades and he never returned to his homeland, despite his mounting international success.
The stories of these two Polish legends, along with filmmaker Karel Reisz's banishment from his native Czechoslovakia, make for an arresting view of adversities encountered by independent artists during the communist era. Judging from the considerable interest generated by Guare's previous creations, one can anticipate lively attention for 3 Kinds of Exile.
The play presented by the Atlantic Theater Company, the Off-Broadway non-proftit company founded in 1985 by playwright David Mamet and others. Atlantic Theater productions include the Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening, and the company runs the Atlantic Acting School, operated jointly with the Tisch School of Arts of New York University. John Guare's 3 Kinds of Exile has its opening night on the 11th of June under Neil Pepe's direction, at the Linda Gross Theater in New York City.
Author: LB 30/05/2013