The Madman and the Nun
Experimental Theatre Chicago sent out a press release in fall 2003 that made me hate the new company instantly. Its stated goal was “to establish Chicago as a national center for experimental theater.” What next, I thought–turning Chicago into the home of deep-dish pizza? They proceeded to throw down the gauntlet of experimentation by producing a script by Paula Vogel, a playwright so radical only the most rebellious fringe companies–the Goodman, Northlight–have dared to stage her work.
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It’s a production the playwright would have despised, however, for its believability. Witkiewicz, who wrote some 30 scripts between 1918 and 1926, wanted to blow realism to bits, believing that in the mechanical age imitating superficial appearances denied the fundamental chaos of human existence. Part of his rebellion against realism may have sprung from a need to forge an identity separate from his father, an influential painter and critic who insisted it was better to paint a head of cabbage accurately than the head of Christ poorly. But Witkiewicz also firmly believed that Western civilization was on its last legs, that all institutions of authority were corrupt, and that human beings were quickly devolving into cogs in a giant, indifferent machine. His existential absurdism–suggesting Jarry, Artaud, and Beckett–might also have grown from a voracious appetite for narcotics.
Experimental Theatre Chicago takes the opposite approach. Even before the show begins, the characters and situations of The Madman and the Nun are made eminently plausible. As the audience settles into its seats, six actors wearing hospital gowns, pajamas, and/or straitjackets lurch about the space, laughing to themselves, contorting their bodies, or staring blindly into the distance. These “lunatics” establish the play’s madhouse setting, of course. But while preshow stunts are usually unconvincing and vaguely embarrassing, here they’re genuinely disturbing. One actor leaves his mouth open so long that great gobs of spit spill out.
Biskup and company discover something in Witkiewicz I’ve never been able to find: lucidity. The playwright may be spinning in his grave, but then Cole Porter famously hated some of the most brilliant interpretations of his compositions. Like a Porter tune, a Witkiewicz play has the structural integrity to withstand a stylistic overhaul. By slowing things down and narrowing the actors’ focus, Biskup shows that Witkiewicz crafted scenes as carefully as Beckett. The desperate whirlwind of a world on the brink of collapse may be missing–at least until the show’s final moments, when the company pulls out all the stops on the script’s bizarre coda. But this staging’s very solidity offers its own kind of terror. Here the reigning medical and religious authorities are not monstrous exaggerations but subtle distortions of people we’ve met, making Witkiewicz’s apocalyptic fantasy feel unsettlingly lifelike.
