Magda Romanska is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy at Emerson College, Dramaturg for Boston Lyric Opera, and Research Associate at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Her books include The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012), Boguslaw Schaeffer: An Anthology (2012), and The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2014). Her Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism and The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor are forthcoming in 2016.
Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera, The Passenger, is not only a complicated work of art, but a complicated work of historical trauma. Magda Romanska reviews the work with a brilliant survey that covers the opera, the history, the novel by Zofia Posmysz, the film by Andrzej Munk, and the responses to the production.
“I don’t worry about science redefining the value of a human being, but I am concerned about technology and the market place doing that,” says Nobel Prize-winner Roald Hoffmann – scientist, playwright and poet.
The regime was harsh, the system absurd but rules made up in Moscow were no match for the individualistic Poles. Magda Romanska’s delightful piece shows us how it was done. Elegantly, of course.
Pushing the boundaries for the past six decades, Bogusław Schaeffer was still blazing the way at the Edinburgh Fringe last year with “one of the best productions since the festival was launched several dozen years ago.” Magda Romanska profiles a Renaissance man.
CR on Facebook
CR on Twitter
E-mail CR