The production “Meditations on Virginity” is an unusual encounter. Barbara Krafftówna, a guest of our “Confrontations’ in 2002 promised to come back as an actress and she kept her promise. Together with Michael Hackett and a group of American and Polish actors she presents a performance described by Prof.Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek as located “between innocence and brutality”
“The moment, when an accidental vagrant throws a rock at Alicia, delineates a border between a protected immunity and a brutal intervention of life. Alicia leads Paul to a garbage heap and she urges him to pick on half eaten bones. Picking on bones is the essence of instinct and symbolizes something quite opposite than the myth of virginity. In our production of “Meditations on Virginity” you watch Alicia a half century later; now she is an inhabitant of the streets in an American metropolis (as in Los Angeles). Her world is our world. It is the world in which brutality constantly attempts to kill innocence and distance the memories of “virginity.”
Our play reverses the direction of Gombrowicz’s story. It starts on the trashed noisy streets of American city and aims to go back to the garden. The only question is — are gardens still possible?