Zapolska's Women: Three Plays: Malka Szwarcenkopf, The Man, and Miss Maliczewska
400
Zapolska's Women: Three Plays: Malka Szwarcenkopf, The Man, and Miss Maliczewska
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Overview
Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921) was one of the foremost modernist Polish playwrights. Zapolska’s Women features three of her performance texts that focus on the economic and social pressures faced by women in partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to the plays, Zapolska’s Women provides a detailed biography of Zapolska, relating her life story to the themes of each play; an analysis of her significance within Polish and European literary and theatrical traditions; and background on the social and historical conditions within Poland during the time the plays were written and originally performed. This informative collection of groundbreaking plays will introduce an English-speaking audience to Zapolska’s important work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841503400 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2009 |
| Series: | ISSN |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Teresa Murjas is a lecturer in theater at the University of Reading.
Teresa Murjas is a professor in the Department of Film, Theatre&Television at the University of Reading, UK. Her research interests lie in translation for performance; conflict representation on stage and screen; and memory, materiality and the archive in performance. She creates work in a range of media, including live performance, video and online, always working collaboratively, and frequently partnering with non-academic organizations, such as museums, galleries and community-based venues. For an example of her webbased work, please see https://www.war-child-archive.com. Alongside Peeling Onions with Granny, Teresa has also set up the performance company Around the Well at the University of Reading. Around the Well is comprised of professional interpreters from a range of backgrounds and the company’s devised performance lecture Between shares stories of their experiences of working with migrants to the United Kingdom in public service settings.
Read an Excerpt
Zapolska's Women: Three Plays
Malka Szwarcenkopf, the Man and Miss Maliczewska
By Teresa Murjas
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-340-0
CHAPTER 1
'To You, it is Light – To Me, Darkness'
Maika Szwarcenkopf (1897)
In the late 1890s Zapolska returned to Poland from Paris where she had been attending actor training classes, including at the Comédie Française, and had performed, in spite of the limitations imposed by a strong Polish accent, in both André Antoine's Théâtre Libre and Lugné Poe's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, on one occasion playing a foreign aristocrat. She had also successfully made contact with Polish émigré circles, emigration by Polish artists and intellectuals to Paris being a frequent occurrence during the nineteenth century, due to the repeated failure of insurrections and the quashing of freedoms of expression. She had, in addition, sent journalistic articles back to Poland, which had been published in the Galician press, portraying scenes of Paris life.
In 1897, the year Maika Szwarcenkopf, the play that secured Zapolska's gradual rise to national fame, was written, the playwright, now aged forty was living in Warsaw, then in the Russian partition. It turned out to be a period of prolific literary and theatrical activity. At the beginning of the year she was invited to participate in a series of guest performances with provincial touring companies. In January she performed to critical acclaim in Lublin as a member of Felicjan Feli ski's company. In February she took part in a charity concert organized in Warsaw, reciting extracts from a poem by the Polish writer Kazimierz Tetmajer. In the second half of March she was associated, for a series of appearances in P ock and W oc awek, with Lucjan Dobrza ski's company. It is clear, from the engagements she received and available reviews of her work, that at this point she was increasingly respected as a significant literary and theatrical figure. Indeed, her stay in Paris had to some degree served to bolster her reputation. She frequently received standing ovations and it was commented, in relation to her work with Antoine, that she had become the prime exponent of a new, more naturalistic and unaffected performance style in Poland. This innovation, however, associated primarily with somewhat controversial naturalistic play texts, was not to every critic's taste – particularly those associated with the conservative press. Zapolska's reputation as a vindictive prima donna was still in formation – this aspect of her public persona was to develop to its fullest over time, based chiefly on an anecdote that she had struck a female co-star with the wrong (solid) part of a stage prop (an axe) deliberately during a performance.
At the beginning of April she travelled, with Czionkowski's company, to St Petersburg, in order to perform at the Kononov theatre. In April and May she starred in, among other plays, Meilhac & Halévy's Frou Frou (1869), Jan S owacki's Mazepa (1840) and her own hugely popular zabusia (Little Frog) (1896). This play is set in Warsaw and tells the story of a clandestine extra-marital 'affair', conducted mainly in the Botanical Gardens, by an infantilized, seductive bourgeois mother of one, full of affectations, whose husband is, by her own estimation, a somewhat unsophisticated, overly direct man with rural roots. Little Frog – as she is playfully nicknamed by her doting, comical and aged parents – is drawn into conflict with her sister-inlaw, Maria, who constitutes the austere polar opposite to her highly contrived, exaggerated femininity. Maria happens to be the fiancée of slippery Little Frog's lover. She falls desperately ill when she learns of the 'affair' and her hair is shaved off during a period of high fever. When she recovers she effectively kidnaps her niece for complex reasons, including revenge. The play includes some brilliant comic scenes involving the lover's visits to the house in the absence of Little Frog's husband, Little Frog's thoroughly wicked, apparently sexually sophisticated neighbour and several frantic entrances and exits through – and concealments on – a balcony.
Zapolska's touring performances were highly successful and on this basis she made plans, reported in the Polish press, to remain in St Petersburg and sign a contract with the state Imperial theatres, via which she would have reaped considerable financial rewards and achieved a greater stability of sorts, though invariably far less creative autonomy. However, these plans never came to fruition and she herself broke the connection.
As a consequence, upon returning to Warsaw, she had effectively eliminated the possibility of performing in the state theatres of any city in the Russian Empire. What followed was a period of intensive focus on playwriting. It was in June that she wrote Maika Szwarcenkopf, in Polish, with some Yiddish, for the Eldorado Theatre, which was a 'garden theatre' (see p. 62, f. 94). Kazimierz Braun points out that 'the history of productions in the Yiddish language within the Jewish communities in Poland goes back to 1876 when Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), actor and playwright, created the first professional theatre company'. He adds that during the period in question (specifically 1885–1905) the Russian authorities imposed a ban on plays written in Yiddish in Russia itself and the Russian partition and that this 'hampered, but did not stop Goldfaden's work'. It is clearly important to take this information into account in relation to the play's performance histories. The Eldorado was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a 'fringe venue', situated on the borders of the Jewish district. Interestingly, it is referred to as a location, reflexively, within the fictional play world, as the place where Maika's father, Old Szwarcenkopf, sells his matches and cigarettes. The phenomenal success of the play – which fuses melodramatic and naturalistic conventions – led to Zapolska's completion, the following year, of a sequel, Jojne Firuikes, in which Ma ka – who commits suicide in the closing act of the first play – appears as a ghost and her former husband, the pitiful, broken Jojne, as the protagonist. The sequel was, in relative terms, a flop. During this period Zapolska also completed another play, a melodrama entitled Antek Nedza, hoping that a state theatre might stage it. However, this plan did not come to fruition.
During the summer season of 1897, working as a freelance actress, Zapolska performed several times in the Warsaw garden theatres; at the Bagatela, or Bagatelle, also managed by Dobrza ski, in the play Karpaccy Górale (Carpathian Mountaineers) (1843) by Korzeniowski (the father of Joseph Conrad); at the Eldorado in her own play Maika Szwarcenkopf (she also contributed towards the direction of the premiere); and at the Wodewil, or Vaudeville, managed by Micha Wo owski, in E. Grange and L. Thiboust's The Thief (c.1857).
Ma'ka Szwarcenkopf premiered in Warsaw on 10 July 1897 with an all-Polish cast and was first published in 1903. Different versions of the play's genesis exist. Dobrza ski, manager of the Eldorado, claimed that Zapolska approached him with the idea shortly after the opening of the season (1 June). Aleksander Rajchman, on the other hand, claimed in a review that Dobrza ski first approached Zapolska, requesting that she should write a play representing the life of Warsaw Jews in order to address a lack of relevant available performance texts, thinking particularly of the theatre's location, its politics and the community it was intended to serve. As Rurawski comments, by choosing this subject matter, the playwright keyed in to debates very much 'of the moment' in intellectual and political circles, and framed by an increasingly oppressive programme of late nineteenth-century Tsarist 'Russification', regarding Polish-Jewish assimilation and what form(s) this might take. This perhaps seems the most likely version though, as Aniela Kallas, who knew the playwright, suggests, Zapolska had an idea for a similar play much earlier on, between 1883 and 1885, in Lwów, where she lived in the Jewish district and reportedly met a woman called Jenta (who appears as a character in the play) who recounted the story of 'some Ma ka's marriage to a stupid Jojne'. Zapolska had also known a tradeswoman called Pake Rozenthal in 1884/85, whom she had owed a considerable sum of money. Characters based on these figures first appeared in Zapolska's earlier short stories – Jenta in We Krwi (In the Blood) (1891) and Pake in Wodzirej (1895). Zapolska's interest in the life of Polish Jews is also expressed in her 1887 novella, Peri i Raj (Peri and Paradise), in which she traces the life of a Ma ka Feigenzwejg, whose fate bears strong similarities to Ma ka Szwarcenkopf's.
The scenes in Maika Szwarcenkopf containing the betrothal ceremony arose, according to Zapolska, as follows
the betrothal scene, Jojne's arrival, the arrival of the girls, the handling of the kerchiefs, the singing, the character of Mowsze [the elder], and finally of the Marszelik himself, have been written by me, and only the words of the Marszelik, written by me in Polish, have been translated by Mr Modzelewski into Yiddish, which in my own copy has not been crossed out, but has been added (I mean in Yiddish). I left this [decisions about Yiddish usage] to the director [Dobrza ski] and the actor playing the part of theMarszelik [Modzelewski]. The wedding couplets and the tuchim [this is a mistake and should read tenaim] were written by an authentic Marszelik, Mr Jukiel (I will not mention his surname). I on the other hand wrote my betrothal scene on the basis of information from two street dealers in second hand goods, to which I have witnesses.
The hand-written copy of the play appears to confirm this version of events – next to the playwright's Polish text is written, in a different hand and in pencil, a Yiddish translation. Zapolska felt compelled to defend her intellectual property when Modzelewski sued her (and lost) suggesting that he had written aspects of the scene. In her defence, Zapolska claimed that prior to his involvement with the production, and even at her first acquaintance with him, she had presented the completed play in its entirety to the Russian censor.
This argument is significant. We know that Zapolska could not speak fluent Yiddish but that she was attempting to write for a mixed, often bi-lingual, audience of Yiddish and Polish speakers – this, indeed, was part of the political remit of the Eldorado, at a time when the public performance of plays written entirely in Yiddish was banned. We know from other sources (for example reviews) that as part of live performances of this play, Yiddish usage is likely to have been considerably greater than the traces we have in both hand-written and published versions. Zapolska wrote extremely quickly and often for an upcoming performance and so this type of scenario was arguably inevitable and it is now difficult to retrieve completely reliable information about the exact nature of the live performances in question, each one of which would, in any case, have differed, irrespective of the level of improvisation allowed or encouraged. This series of events might also account for some irregularities in terms of both Yiddish and French language usage in the published versions.
The popular success of the play at the garden theatres can be expressed in material terms. There were 88 performances altogether, most of them at the Eldorado, but also including twenty at the Bagatela and twelve at the Wodewil. The number of tickets sold for the premiere exceeded 1,600 (the previous day the theatre had sold 347 tickets for another performance, which was more usual). On the 12 July the performance was sold out. Sales remained extremely high throughout the run, always exceeding 1,000 tickets. Zapolska had been paid an advance of 300 roubles, whereas the production grossed 22,000 in one season. This was, in relative terms, a theatrical phenomenon, and the play soon attracted the attention of directors of permanent theatres and touring provincial companies across the former Polish territories. Zapolska asserted her intellectual property rights in a statement in the Daily Courier on the 30 July. By the end of August, the main theatres in Lwów, Kraków, iódz and Lublin had acquired performance rights. The play was also performed in several more theatres in these cities, as well as in Poznan, Wilno, iuck, Bydgoszcz, Toru , Kiev and New York (in Polish and Yiddish). It was translated into Czech and performed in 1907 in Prague, into German around 1899 and performed in Vienna, into Russian in 1901 and performed in Moscow and Odessa and into Yiddish and performed in Warsaw in 1917.
Jadwiga Czachowska understands the success of the performance chiefly within the context of a particular version of Polish theatre history, rather than Yiddish theatre history (probably due to the lack of information available to her about the latter in the 1950s, when she completed her bio- bibliography). A more unified approach might on the whole be infinitely more desirable given that both strands can be seen as developing in the same city. She quotes from the Warsaw Courier and the Izraelite newspapers, where agreement was expressed that the playwright had, in Maika, achieved an effective juxtaposition of contrasting perspectives via strong characterization and had captured some of the complexity of questions of identity being debated in the potentially inflammatory political climate. Both publications identified the playwright's apparent attempt at impartiality as a positive strategy. In addition, she was commended by several reviewers for representing 'new subject matter' in a theatrical context. Others suggested that the play balanced precariously between gritty realism and melodramatic pathos and that the protagonists as a consequence did not arouse sympathy. Yet others, however, most harbouring a strongly right-wing, Polish nationalistic tone, expressed objections to the use of Yiddish in the theatre, it being regarded as 'inferior' and the 'language of the gutter', not suitable for a Polish stage. In addition, the fact that actors appeared to be adding more Yiddish than may have been suggested by the manuscript itself, in an improvisatory fashion, was regarded with suspicion.
Michael C. Steinlauf, in a fascinating book that brings together a series of articles about the representation of Jews in Eastern Europe, locates the play and its initial performances more firmly in a different set of highly significant and under-explored contexts crucial for gaining an understanding of its history. He cites Eliza Orzeszkowa's Meir Ezofowicz (1878) and Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta (1846) as 'influential predecessors' of Maika in Polish literature and theatre and writes that
in focusing on the custom of arranged marriages as the instrument of Maika's destruction, Zapolska chose a theme hardly foreign to Jewish audiences but placed it in a modern context. Arranged marriages (as well as hadorim [traditional elementary schools], the object of her concern in Jojne Firuikes ...) had been regularly attacked by Polish and Jewish reformers since the beginning of the nineteenth century and were constantly parodied in Yiddish literature and theatre.
Also important in this context is the consideration that Ma ka's motivation might have been drawn by Zapolska as more nuanced than Steinlauf implies, though this may be something that emerges to a greater degree in performance. She is portrayed as a highly complex figure – arguably irrationally stubborn – someone who is, up to a point, aware of her limitations of understanding in relation to her own background. Indeed, negative attitudes towards arranged marriage are arguably also critiqued throughout the play. Steinlauf suggests that there is 'nothing particularly Jewish' about the protagonist (it might also be interesting to ask whether there is anything particularly Polish about her), though what precisely these categories might mean or might have meant is somewhat difficult to quantify. In addition this may arguably have been Zapolska's intention. In what sense, we are prompted to ask, is Ma ka Jewish, or not, since Zapolska perhaps uses the character, given her own cultural and political position, as a way of mediating between different sets of social and cultural conventions theatrically and problematizing notions of fixed categories and boundaries in relation to questions if identity. The result is, as Steinlauf expresses it, the character's 'universality' – a difficult concept that one might wish to interrogate further. He continues; 'for many turn-of-the-century Warsaw Jews, whose lives had begun to be rent by profound intergenerational and domestic conflicts' (those Zapolska indeed seeks to explore) 'Maika's simple declaration that "every human being has the right to live and be happy" probably struck a chord'. He argues that in this play: 'Warsaw Jews gained something even Goldfaden had not been able to give them: the first, however flawed, theatrical reflection – several years before the production of comparable Yiddish plays – of themselves.' Steinlauf explores extensively what may have 'appealed so mightily to Jewish as well as Polish audiences'. Framing his argument with the suggestion that Polish perceptions of Jews remained consistently rooted in ideas around 'exoticism', he puts forward the idea that Polish critics of the play assumed that what rendered it additionally popular with its various audience members was Zapolska's so-called 'ethnographic approach'. It may be argued, for example, that they read it in terms of concepts of realism and authenticity – as a kind of 'historical' or 'social document' – rather than, perhaps, in terms of theatricality and representation, which is arguably what Jewish critics also did, from a different perspective. Note also Steinlauf's phrase flawed theatrical reflection. Steinlauf asserts, however, that Zapolska's 'ethnography was problematic' and suggests that the betrothal ceremony written by Zapolska 'bears little resemblance to any known Jewish ceremony', that it is 'filled with errors of ritual ... and language ... and is written in stylized Polish-Yiddish jargon, with which, indeed, the whole play is filled'. One might in addition assert that, given the play's form, which expresses a tension between naturalism and melodrama, issues of stylization, authenticity, representation and who should engage in it, both textually speaking and in live performance, are brought into sharper focus. For example, questions concerning whether the actors involved in any production were, should and could have been Jewish (particularly the actor playing Ma ka) would have been of central importance during the staging of the play. These questions would have affected the ways in which the performance was read, as well as practitioners' perceptions about possible target audiences. Inflecting and fuelling these questions was the broader political context, with its fermenting debates concerning nationhood, as well as the daily re-enactment of social inequality and discrimination, which the play's naturalism purported to express and explore. Arguments concerning identity formation and its destabilization, tradition and progressivity, authenticity and dissimulation would have been key concerns, particularly given the perceived national and political identity of the playwright and her gender.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zapolska's Women: Three Plays by Teresa Murjas. Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction - Page 9Teresa Murjas 'To You, it is Light - To Me, Darkness' - Page 25
Teresa Murjas Matka Szwarcenkopf [1897] - Page 49
Teresa Murjas 'Condemned to Desire what we Cannot Possess' Page 155
Teresa Murjas The Man [1901] - Page 169
Teresa Murjas 'Sister or Servant' - Page 261
Teresa Murjas Miss Maliczewska [1910] - 267
Teresa Murjas