La MaMa Presents COFFEEHOUSE CHRONICLES #153 WITKACY

LA MAMA, the 2018 Tony Award winning theater presents, COFFEEHOUSE CHRONICLES #153 WITKACY celebrating the work of turn-of-the-century Polish avant-garde playwright Stanis aw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885 1939), known as "Witkacy," Saturday, April 27 at 3:00pm at The Ellen Stewart Theater (66 East 4th Street), in the Manhattan.

COFFEEHOUSE CHRONICLES #153 WITKACY is curated by Michal Gamily and Tomek Smolarski; moderated by Frank Hentschker; with panelists, Krystyna Lipinska-Illakowicz, Daniel Pinchbeck, Jadwiga Kosicka-Gerould, Natalia Korczakowska, Eri Nox; live performances directed by Natalia Korczakowska (Narcotics: Peyote), Zenon Kruszelnicki (The Shoemakers), Daniel Irizarry (The Madman and the Nun), Eri Nox (They); and will feature archival material from the La MaMa Archives.

Witkacy, regarded as one of Europe's most radical novelists, dramatists, painters, and philosophers in an era when artists competed fiercely to break away from all that had come before. Writing in Polish and banned in Communist Poland, while he may not have attained the international attention of the Surrealists, Dadaists, or other Absurdists, his work remains a striking example of modernism. Witkacy wrote over 30 plays between 1918 and his suicide in 1939. Despite his productivity, he was practically ignored in his time and left behind no direct disciples, yet has gone on to mysteriously stir up more excitement among young playwrights than practically any other 20th-century writer, even Eugene O'Neill. His influence is perhaps magnified by the enthusiasm of European scholars, but his status as progenitor of the Avant Garde is undeniable. His plays were rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s and hailed as precursors of the European theatrical movement known as the Theater of the Absurd. The afternoon will also include a celebration of CUNY Graduate Center Segal Theatre Center's most ambitious publishing project so far: four volumes of Stanis aw Ignacy Witkiewicz's Collected Plays. The anthology represents the very first complete edition of his 23 extant plays in English translation, including The Madman and the Nun, The Crazy Locomotive, The Water Hen, The Shoemaker, They, The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, The Beelzebub Sonata, and others.

FREE ADMISSION. To reserve tickets please visit: http://lamama.org/witkacy/. This edition of Coffeehouse Chronicles will be FREE of charge to audiences thanks to the generous support of The Polish Cultural Institute.

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