Pope St. John Paul II, Modernist (theatrically speaking)

 I had the great good fortune this weekend to see a production of The Jeweler's Shop by Karol Wojtyła, Bishop of Krakow (best known, of course, for his later career as the Bishop of Rome, Pope St. John Paul II). A group of Catholic young adults in Columbus decided, in best theatrical tradition, that they wanted to put on a show, and tackled Wojtyła's dense text creditably, with several fine performances and original music. The Jeweler's Shop is a show that's rarely performed, so I was delighted to have the chance to see it so close to home.

It's not that The Jeweler's Shop is a difficult show to stage -- no large cast extravaganza, no big sets, no special effects tour-de-force. It is, in fact, deceptively simple. Most of the action is interior. Most of the script consists of monologues to the audience, with lyrical passages of "rhapsodic" mediations on love. Those rhapsodic passages are key to understanding Wojtyla's approach to theater.

When people hear that a Catholic pope was formerly an actor and a playwright, their understandable assumption would be that he was a classically trained, old-school showman, standing in the solid theatrical traditions of Shakespeare and well-crafted plays and big proscenium-arch acting. And so, it is perhaps a shock to encounter the actual work of the man. Karol Wojtyła was no traditionalist. He didn't act in the kitchen-sink realism style of Stanislavski, or write standard five-act dramas replete with old-fashioned stuff like dialogue and scenes and story-telling structure. As a man of the stage, he was an experimental modernist.

For Wojtyła, theater was a ritual, as stylized as a liturgy, a vehicle for the Word. The actor is on stage to convey not a character, but an idea, which takes root in the minds of the audience who hear the spoken word and grapple internally with the problem the play propounds. This style, in which the word becomes, in effect, a vehicle of the internal movement of the soul, is called Rhapsodic. As he himself explains:

The Rhapsodic company has accustomed us to a theater of the word. What does this mean? Is not every theater a theater of the word? Does not the word constitute an essential, primary element of every theater? Undoubtedly it does. Nonetheless, the position of the word in a theater is no always the same. As in life, the word can appear as an integral part of action, movement, and gesture, inseparable from all human practical activity; or it can appear as "song" -- separate, independent, intended only to contain and express thought, to embrace and transmit a vision of the mind. In the latter aspect, or position, the word becomes "rhapsodic", and a theater based on such a concept of the word becomes a rhapsodic theater. (Wojytła, The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, 372)

This rhapsodic vision is best realized in small-scale, experimental productions, with minimal set and a few significant props, and it was well-suited to the kind of underground resistance theater that Wojtyła spearheaded under the Nazi occupation of Poland. The rhapsodic group proclaimed the great patriotic Polish dramas and epics, stripped down to their essential ideas and staged not as dramatic scenes between characters but as ideas and themes presented directly to the audience:

[The Rhapsodic Theater] made of them not traditional 'adaptations for the stage', but always specific and authentic uncoverings of the very essence of the works, their thought and ideas, their authors' intellectual vision. This is a novel and revealing approach. (The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, 373)

The religious, intellectual Rhapsodic Theater troupe forged on after WWII, under the challenging conditions of the Communist regime, which favored experimental theater, but of the atheistic, psychologically intrusive style pioneered by Jerzy Grotowski. (Fans of cult cinema will recognize his name from My Dinner with Andre, in which Andre tells Wally Shawn [later of Princess Bride fame] about his time with Grotowski's theater troup in Poland.) Grotowski also saw theater as liturgy, but unlike the Rhapsodists, he wanted theater to be literally liturgical, embued with the power to evoke in reality what it proclaimed through the word. Wojytła's rhapsodism was confined to an intellectual experience, in which the audience members would grapple internally with an idea and let it come to fruition in them through personal conversion and then practical action. Grotowski wanted his actors to literally experience the suffering or the ecstasy they were performing on stage -- an emotional transformation rather than an intellectual one. Many of his actors went on to have mental breakdowns through the abusive theatrical workshop training Grotowski subjected them to. 

However, Grotowski was a card-carrying communist, and the Rhapsodists were practicing Catholics championed by Bishop Wojtyła, a thorn in the side of the Communist regime. In 1960, the year that Wojtyła wrote The Jeweler's Shop based on his years of pastoral experience with married couples, Grotowski's Laboratory Theater was just getting off the ground, with funding from the government. By 1967, the Communist government of Krakow had suppressed the Rhapsodic Theater, in large part because of its association with Wojtyła, newly appointed a Cardinal. Grotowski went on to great acclaim in theatrical circles, and Wojytła went on to become Pope, and we shall see who is remembered as more influential.

The Rhapsodic Theater did tackle more traditional styles of drama, but Wojytła himself realized that this style wasn't really suited to dramas built on standard theatrical elements such as characterization and plot. As bishop, he wrote a review of Actors in Elsinore, the Rhapsodic take on Hamlet using various scenes from Shakespeare:

This Shakespearian production has been a great effort for the rhapsodists, because Shakespeare, as I have said, is not at all rhapsodic but theatrical, dramatic, comic, and tragic in his own way. He re-creates life and does not evade its concrete events; on the contrary, he enriches his plays with them. It is not easy to isolate in Shakespeare a pure construction of ideas or to stylize the action in a rhapsodic fashion to give sway to the word. For this reason, while agreeing that this production... had its origins in the rhapsodists' profound need for self-definition and undoubtedly expresses that need, one must also state that it is a new confirmation and experience of the proper direction of this particular theater. (The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, 378)

 So! Wojytła's plays are not well-crafted theater pieces in which the dialogue and plot does most of the work, independent of the skill of the actor (which is why A Mid-Summer Night's Dream can be performed by middle-schoolers and still be basically intelligible). And this is why you generally won't see the pope's play performed by your parish drama club, and why I was so excited to see any performance of it. It was written both as a Catholic meditation on marriage, to be contemplated individually by readers, and as an experimental piece of theater for a troupe trained in the particular and demanding style of Rhapsodic theater.  

(For all drama clubs: Wojtyła's most traditionally-crafted and accessible play is an earlier, more obscure work, Our God's Brother [1949], based on the life of Polish patriot, artist, and religious brother Albert Chmielowski.)