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Event
Into the Absurd: Readings and Conversation - The Witnesses by Tadeusz Rózewicz
The IRC presents our first Into The Absurd installment of 2017, featuring The Witnesses, a play by Tadeusz Rózewicz, one of the giants of Polish postwar literature.
Into The Absurd was born in 2016 from audience requests to experience seldom-performed Absurdist works in an intimate setting with the opportunity to dig into the many ideas and thoughts that percolate following the reading.
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium is the only company in America exclusively devoted to absurdist theater. The IRC was founded in 2006 and began performing at LEtage Cabaret, whose intimate surroundings evoke the Paris cafes where Beckett and Ionesco first introduced their groundbreaking works in mid-20th century Europe. LEtage continues to serve as the home for Into the Absurd, a wonderfully atmospheric setting for seldom-produced poetic and important works.
You serve the IRC in a very important capacity as Ambassadors for Absurdism, by attending staged readings and productions, and by introducing your friends and colleagues to the IRCs particular brand of Absurd Theatre.
An important component of Into the Absurd script-in-hand readings is the audience-driven conversation following the performance with the cast. So plan to stay, share and have your curiosity quotient satisfied!
Into the Absurd is a free event, Pay What You Can Donations are always welcome, and help sustain this evolving program. Join us for an evening of exciting, intelligent, absurdist theater, the perfect gathering and antidote for our perplexing and constantly surprising world.
A rare opportunity to hear this seldom-performed work, expressing the beauty and poetry of Rózewicz's upbringing under conditions in which free ideas and thought were banned.
The Witnesses was written in 1962. During the Second World War, Rózewicz was a soldier - like his brother - in Poland's underground army. Unlike his brother, who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, he survived the war. The five year long German occupation had been utterly brutal, where random street roundups could result in a ride on a westward Germany-bound train. A time when six of Poland's 36 million citizens lost their lives, when cities were destroyed and Polish land was used to construct Nazi concentration camps.
In The Witnesses, Rózewicz created a play of three, at first read, unrelated parts. These can be appreciated on two levels: the first, where the text is seemingly transparent and acceptable to censors; the other, including sub-text requiring insight and reflection, providing meaning between the lines, a feeling of secrets shared and a riveting intellectual experience.
In 1945, the Red Army brought "liberation." What followed was not freedom, but rather an imposed Communist regime and years of Stalinist terror as again people disappeared in random roundups, again resulting on deportation on trains moving eastward towards Siberian Gulags, while others were interred.
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LocationL'Etage Cabaret (View)
624 South 6th Street (above Beau Monde)
Philadelphia, PA 19147
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 18 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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