Wojciech Niemczyk and Tomasz Nosinski with the Natural Born Chillers in “In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields.” By Maciek Zórawiecki.
“I’ve been thinking of this play for a long time, because this play of Koltès’s is considered very difficult to stage. And it also rhymed in with the stage of my life I found myself in, that I was going through and the way that I felt at this moment,” Polish director Radosław Rychcik told me. “Because to me it’s a play about the fear of meeting someone else, another person. The dread of intimacy.”
This was last September, and we were sitting in the mezzanine lounge of Portland’s Ace Hotel, near where Rychcik and the company of his production of Barnard-Marie Koltès’s In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, which opens tonight and plays through Jan. 16 at On the Boards (tickets $25), were staying during their appearance at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts‘s TBA Festival. It was one of the stranger interviews I’ve done. I’d met Rychcik a day or two before and we’d chatted quite a bit, but due to the early hour of the interview and, perhaps, being overly exuberant at what I’m pretty sure he said was a Scissor Sisters concert the night before, Rychcik asked to answer questions in Polish, translated by Dorota Sobstel, his assistant. So I dutifully posed them to him in English, and waited for her to translate his answers for me, unless he disagreed or wanted to clarify, in which case he’d pipe in in English himself. I’d also invited along Jonathan Walters, the artistic director of Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre, who knew more than me about contemporary Polish theatre, having spent several years in the late Nineties working in Poland.
Only 29, Rychcik is a young Polish director whose international reputation has essentially skyrocketed over the course of only a couple years. Originally a student of Polish literature at Warsaw University, Rychcik changed course after experiencing Polish avant-garde theatre in college. He went on to study directing and worked with the likes of Krystian Lupa, perhaps Poland’s most famous director, serving as an assistant on Lupa’s internationally celebrated Factory 2, a seven-plus-hour theatrical spectacle.
Rychcik first came to the attention of American audiences when his production/adaptation Versus: In the Jungle of Cities, from Bertolt Brecht, played the 2010 Under the Radar Festival to mixed reviews. But it’s In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields that’s really established him as an important new voice on the international scene, the show having already played TBA and REDCAT in LA, and next will be at Vancouver B.C.’s PuSH Festival.
The backstory of the show is actually somewhat amusing. The show was originally produced at Teatr Stefana Zeromskiego (Stefan Zeromski Theatre), a Polish regional theatre in Kielce. Seeking to offer something more substantive to young audiences, company member Wojciech Niemczyk helped arrange for Rychcik, his former classmate, to come direct a show. Along with Tomasz Nosinski, another former university classmate who also appeared in Versus, the three spent only three weeks rehearsing In the Solitude before it opened. The band the Natural Born Chillers—little known in Poland before Rychcik discovered them playing a club gig—were invited in for only the last five days, during which they composed the entire live score for the piece.
Director Radoslaw Rychcik. Photo by Julia Hil.
“I just heard them play in a nightclub and I thought they were just amazing and excellent,” Rychcik explained of the band, “and that their music itself created this space for this play to take place, because it already implied where the actors could stand, and where the action could go on.”
That a play with such a cobbled together production schedule and history has now gone on to tour the world to acclaim is all the more surprising given its source text. Bernard-Marie Koltès was a respected experimental dramatist in France before he died in 1991. But if he’s little known to American audiences, it’s because frankly, his work is so very French: abstract, lyrical, obscure. In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, for instance, is just an extended dialogue between two men known only as the “Dealer” and the “Client” in an alley. What is actually being sought is never made explicit (though the title contains a pretty clear allusion to drugs). Much like Waiting for Godot, the point has nothing to do with the story but rather the process, what is revealed about the nameless, universalist characters along the way.
In short, it’s the sort of thing that blew my mind when I was an undergrad and would greedily buy stacks of used avant-garde European literature at Powell’s Books to consume in late night cigarette-and-caffeine fueled reading sessions, but which now usually strikes me as needlessly opaque, pretentious, or duplicative of other writers’ efforts. Rychcik’s genius lies in having seen in such a script something more interesting than I would have noticed, and having the creativity to actually realize it onstage in a compelling and powerful way.
His production doesn’t unfold as a “play” so much as a spoken word rock concert. Nosinski (the Dealer) and Niemczyk (the Client) deliver their lines largely to the audience as though dueling frontmen for the band, dressed in plain dark suits reminiscent of Tarantino goons (though, given the scenario and staging, I have to admit that they also look quite a bit like the Blues Brothers, sans shades and hats). Backed by the band, the dialogue becomes a series of monologues of ferocious intensity that are downright startling.
“Koltès’s play is written for two actors and it has a lot of hints of where it takes place. So the setting is night, a desolate place—a back street, a totally isolated spot,” Rychcik told me. “But what I was trying to do is totally get rid of this literal translation of the place, get rid of literalism [altogether]. My idea for the adaptation of the text was adding the music into it, because with the music, this kind of talking about a meeting of, in this situation, a dealer and a client, is always very performative. Because it’s always a performance of my fear of solitude, my fear of proximity to the other human being, and I think this kind of dialogue is very accelerated and enriched by the music that was added.”
What’s so surprising about Rychcik’s In the Solitude, though, isn’t the concept, no matter how cool: it’s the performances and characterizations that Rychcik gets out of his actors. His subtle understanding of the nuances of the script, and how it reveals the fears, self-loathing, paranoia, and combativeness occurring during the transaction, causes him to take his actors in completely the opposite direction from what you might expect. The Dealer’s monologues about the offense he takes at the impudence of his would-be client aren’t played as self-reflective threats à la The Godfather; instead, they become frightened, wounded expressions of desperation (the dealer, like the client, is an addict to the transaction), while the Client’s very desperation, the sense that he knows he has to purchase from the Dealer, empowers him—a game with a fixed outcome is only worth playing to deny to the other his sense of victory.
Transformed thusly through Rychcik’s production, the needlessly obscure language becomes poetic evocations of the emotional state of the characters: songs, in other words.
“Actually it was very interesting to find out later that Koltès himself thought of this dialogue between the two people in the play as a kind of two blues singers,” he added, “people who are singing their ballads to each other. So actually the whole text was considered by him as a song.”
At the very least, I hope Rychcik’s show serves to re-awaken American interest in Eastern European theatre, and particularly Poland, whose scene is extremely exciting and fresh. The heyday of Eastern European drama was the late-Cold War, when the artists were often seen as a bastion of social and cultural resistance to Soviet dominance. In that era, playwrighting was a risky and frequently censored venture; direct confrontation was not allowed openly. This was a large part of the reason that directors in countries like Poland and Lithuania developed such aesthetically radical approaches to producing plays: done creatively and effectively, the trials of a Hamlet say (I’m thinking of a famous essay by the Polish critic Jan Kott here) becomes a mirror of the experience of living under Soviet oppression.
But it’s short-sighted to see the aesthetic and performative innovation of such work purely in terms of a response to a particular socio-political moment. Asked about what keeps driving innovation in Polish theater, Rychcik explained that in the end, it’s not just a matter of “coded language” or a particular form of resistance, but that the theatre, rather, is a laboratory in which artists explore the forces changing their societies and culture.
“I think I can answer your question by referring to Krystian Lupa, who is in my view the main drive of Polish,” he told me. “Of course during Communist times in Poland there was this game of talking about the occupier—if people are enslaved, they talk about the system. However, Lupa had always done plays where he directly talked about the human being, man as such, about existence, about the ego of mankind. So issues that would be metaphysical, moral, socially inclined. And so when Communism fell, Lupa continued to be a natural drive of theatre. And actually with Lupa, he took this line of referring to modern European culture, and so film and all the means of modernity. So people started going to theatre as a means of opposing—or not even opposing, but maybe trying to find an alternative to television and film.”