Reading Radosław Rychcik's "In the Solitude of Cotton Fields" at OtB

RADOSŁAW RYCHCIK • STEFAN ZEROMSKI THEATRE "In the Solitude of Cotton Fields"

And now for something completely different. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (through Jan. 16 at On the Boards) plays, as Jeremy aptly put it, as a "spoken word rock concert."

The words spoken happen to be in Polish, so most of us will be reading the fairly dense supratitle translations that flash past, each hot on the heels of the other. It makes you want to see the show twice--once to read Bernard-Marie Koltès ritualized text on desire, and once to immerse yourself in the visual aesthetic. 

If it helps, imagine the Blues Brothers transplanted into an Eastern European punk concert, and improvising a slam-poetry show out of a few of Roland Barthes' essays. The curtain goes up on a stage filled with dry ice fog, lights shining up, with two men in black suits with skinny black ties fronting a real, and very talented band (The Natural Born Chillers, throwing out rock, techno, and ambiant with aplomb). The two "dance" a bit, using sharp, repetitive moves--one throws his head back in an approximation of a wild laugh, but completely divorced from glee. I came to feel that, past the skin, I was watching skeletons with behavioral tics.

Director Radosław Rychcik says "[T] me it's a play about the fear of meeting someone else, another person. The dread of intimacy." In Koltès' experimental play (of the same name), the usual referents have been pared away. All you learn is that it's a dark hour, a time when men and beasts exist on the same plane, and that two people (The Dealer, The Client) have encountered each other in an alley. They hardly agree on even that.

Going purely by the text (and a working knowledge of Koltès' life), it's an abstraction of cruising for sex, or drugs--there's fear of reprisal for asking for or suggesting the wrong thing, and the illegality of the act is underlined. But to observe Koltès-the-playwright's handiwork is to quickly realize that his interest is not to encode his content, but to frustrate category. For this hour, "men and beasts exist on the same plane"; and in the theatre, the audience has to face up to an extreme, yet undifferentiated desire, without knowing how they feel about it. 

RADOSŁAW RYCHCIK • STEFAN ZEROMSKI THEATRE "In the Solitude of Cotton Fields"

Rychcik has some Brecht, Barthes, and Flaubert under his belt (sort of a shady phrase, now that I think about it), so I think we can assume that he enjoys the challenge of staging works that aren't designed to be crowd-pleasers.

Here, his direction gives you an aesthetic (visual and musical) that engages the audience right away, but neither is it simply an ironic, surprising juxtaposition. There's a sincerity to it, as if Rychcik is saying, No, no, you've been doing it all wrong. The cool detached thing...try the line while slicing into your stomach and grabbing the first thing you feel. 

Wojciech Niemczyk is The Dealer; he's red-eyed and widow-peaked, like a cross between a Munster and Det. Joe Friday. He's insistent on providing some kind of service, it's why he's there in the street in the middle of the night, it's the only reason, and so (he explains) it's only right that he greet The Client (but note that he's speaking to you, the audience, who have come out to see something tonight) with modesty, subservience.

Simple enough, but Tomasz Nosinski's Client is a creature of the daylight, with strung-out eyes, tousled hair, and presumptive cheekbones. His model's hands fuss at his clothing, his collar, his tie. How do you even presume that he's in need of something, let alone imagine that someone standing in an alley can satisfy his craving (which, let it be noted, he's not admitting).

So begins the tug-of-war. The Dealer cries out (literally, loudly, achingly) to have his moment of being-of-service. The Client postures and protects. In delivering their arguments outward, rather than to each other, they make plain the compulsive performance of trust, of lowered inhibition, until someone is naked.

There's also what amounts to a video collage of sex and fetish and objets du désir, and I mean collage not just in the sense of the splicings, but in the way it could have been titled A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (the name of the Barthes work that Rychcik staged earlier). I think if the play has done a number on you, you can tell by your response to this piece. In itself it's not the most amazing thing ever united on video, but how do you respond to these images of desire after you've been placed empathetically in front of it? Each frame could be the thing that breaks you down, exposes you, sends you out into the night in search of more.