Gombrowicz's "Ivona' at Swarthmore

From his Diaries to TransAtlantic and from Ferdydurke to Pornografia, Witold Gombrowicz wrote with a sneering savagery, most of it directed at the aristocracy and its peculiar manners, its sense of entitlement.

Neither are the middle and lower classes spared for aspiring to the upper classes. The Polish writer lacerates his characters, leaving the audience laughing, half in horror, half in self-recognition.

Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was a worthy heir to the absurdist tradition of the borderline schizophrenic Polish writer Ignacy Witkiewicz, whose futuristic 1927 novel Insatiability invented the word upupienie, derived from pupa, the infantile word for buttocks, constructing it into the verb upupic: to fannify, to make into an ass, and into the abstract noun upupienie— the state of fannification or backsidedness.

Gombrowicz adopted this usage in his novel Ferdydurke to describe the process of mutual debasement, which he regarded as characterizing human relationships. At the end of Ferdydurke, he writes:

"It's the end, what a gas,
And who's read it is an ass!"

Thus he turns not only all of his characters into asses, but his readers and his audiences as well.

Shambling heroine

This notion is evident in all of Gombrowicz's writing, and hardly anywhere is the device better used than his 1938 play, Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, whose wretched heroine shambles and lumbers along while everyone else in the royal court— the king and queen, their sycophants and servants— mince and prance in their own superiority.

Nevertheless, once he sets eyes on Ivona, Prince Philip (played with superb disingenuousness by Josh McLucas) declares that he feels "really a prince" for the first time and announces that he will marry her even though, as he acknowledges, she's "a universal irritant."

Of Gombrowicz's three plays, Ivona is perhaps the best known outside Poland. In 1973, it inspired an opera in Germany starring the late Pina Bausch, before she became the choreographer Pina. In 2002, Theater Exile produced Ivona in Philadelphia with Amy Smith in the title role. Last month it was performed at Swarthmore College with the same set designer, Matt Saunders, who teaches there.

This time, Saunders created a minimalist set, a high-walled Great Hall with five mirrored doors on each side that created the kind of absurd atmosphere that set up the essence of Gombrowicz's overall tone but sometimes ate up the dialogue (unless the actors were swallowing their words.)

Struck mute

For the title character, this was no problem: Near the end of his life, Gombrowicz eliminated all of her lines. In earlier versions, Ivona speaks a few barely intelligible, mostly meaningless lines.

At Swarthmore, Director Elizabeth Stevens used an earlier version in which Ivona speaks, but with mercifully muted brevity, her lower lip slackened unattractively and her hands gnarled in a particularly rebarbative way. The most biting verbal exchanges take place around Ivona, as if she were invisible, an unheimlich maneuvering of her into a non-entity.

For just as Ivona (Sophia Naylor, the night I saw it, Maddie Charne on alternates) provokes disgust among the members of the court, they begin to recognize that her repugnance has "infected" them. She has somehow slimed them, as we might say today.

"Then how does she manage to get into every corner and to look through every window?" says the King, the deliriously funny Sasha Rojavin, who plays him with just a dash of Sacha Baron Cohen. "She will use up all our windows in no time at all." Nina Serbedzija plays the Queen delicately as a slightly clueless dreamer concerned with proprieties.

Death by choking

Once Philip realizes that Ivona loves him, he says, "I can't look down on her if she loves me. I cannot scorn from outside because I am part of her." So he resolves to learn to love her, only to realize that there is no escaping her.

The only way to cleanse themselves of Ivona's slime, Philip and the courtiers conclude, is to kill her. The King's wonderfully foppish Chamberlain (Patrick Ross) suggests they hold a banquet and feed Ivona a bony fish, like pike, that she might choke on. "Why not carp?" comes the reply— an inside joke likely to be grasped only in Poland, where carp is the popular fish.

Similarly, when Rojavin as the king ad-libs, "I don't need to eat children. I have a pastry chef," some audiences might miss the connection to Jonathan Swift's musings about eating infants, or the French fairy tale in which the chef wonders what sauce will go well in the pie with the children he is ordered to bake. Stevens allowed her first-rate players other liberties, but none captured the Gombrowicz spirit as brilliantly as this line.

A dance work, almost

Lighting designer Jim Murphy's sudden blackouts and subtly shifting daylight, and sound designer, Michael Kiley's often blaring cacophonies trumpeted changes of scene and moved the play through time. Laila Swanson— who, like Murphy, teaches at Swarthmore— made the sumptuously shimmering costumes of varying wine colors.

Director Stevens is an assistant professor at Swarthmore's Theater Department, whose chair, Allen Kuharski, is an expert on all things Gombrowicz and Polish theater in general. Stevens appeared in Headlong Dance Theater's hit, Cell, for the 2006 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she will direct Headlong's new full-length piece, Desire, premiering May 4-6 at the Performance Garage in Philadelphia.

Indeed, Stevens's direction of Ivona conveyed much of the movement, gesture and rhythm of a dance work. Under her guidance the cast captured the gesture and mimicry that are essential to Gombrowicz's characters and wholeheartedly abandoned themselves to his absurdity.

For more than two hours she kept them moving at a fast clip, up- and downstage, rarely standing in one spot, popping in and out of the doors, lugging in furniture, hiding behind sofas. In a play with some long sections of dialogue, this peripatetic movement kept the audience engaged as Stevens deftly drew Ivona to her riotously mordant end.