The Mother
Witkiewicz threw grenades at everything rational, predictable, and conventional. He experimented with narcotics, writing extensively about their effects; he even opened a portrait studio where he painted under their influence–the more expensive the drug, the more expensive the portrait. He paraded about the streets of his native Zakopane in absurd costumes yet delighted in meeting guests at his flat stark naked. And he poured every ounce of his iconoclasm into his plays, believing that the theater could deliver metaphysical truths only through the perversion of forms. His plays pitch wildly from one stylistic extreme to another, and logic is for the most part thrown to the winds. Characters die in one act and return later with no explanation. Witkiewicz offers impassioned political critiques in such extreme forms that he seems to be ridiculing his own most cherished beliefs. In the words of director Jan Kott, his is a theater that is “always scoffing.”
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Most important, Pilch and Marlow refuse to surrender theatricality to reverence for the text. Their production is full of wild blocking, outrageous images, even a few absurd sound effects. They show more concern for impact than accuracy, a priority Witkiewicz would have respected. At the same time, this is no free-for-all. Every explosive moment is carefully contained, as the characters struggle to suppress the volcanic antisocial forces about to boil over inside them. This sense of simultaneous frustration and release gives the evening a frantic tension. The show can’t be stopped even for intermission.
