The Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and the Polish Cultural Institute New York present

A reading of Magda Fertacz’s play Puppenhaus Treatment

translated by Artur Zapalowski and directed by Zishan Ugurlu at the Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival

Sunday, May 12th @ 7PM
Bohemian National Hall
321 E. 73rd St., New York, NY, 10021
FREE and open to the public. RSVP required.
Get your free ticket at Eventbrite

In honor of Vaclav Havel, The Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival, presents Spring Weekend: a showcase of emerging Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak playwrights whose work grapples with the social and political issues of today. The plays have been translated into English and will be brought to life in staged readings by local New York performers and directors. The program also features a full Romanian production.

Puppenhaus. Treatment is inspired in part by the life of Maria Malicka, a famous pre-war actress for whom an entire theater was built on Warsaw’s Marszalkowska Street. It is also inspired by the life of Arletty (Leonie Bathiat) – a renowned French film and theater actress of the 1930s and ‘40s. Playwright Magda Fertacz examines issues of treason and complicity through the lens of alternative codes of memory. By constructing a theatrical fantasy about wartime life, Fertacz interrogates the stigmatization, punishment and condemnation of individuals who, for any number of reasons, renounce heroism. How do we construct historical memory and our moral evaluation of past choices? How can collective memory be healed?

Magda Fertacz (born in 1975) is a leading representative of a generation of Polish writers who have renewed Polish drama in post-socialist Poland. In her work, Fertacz analyzes interpersonal relations in their purely human aspect against their wider, social context. Her debut play was Dust, which drew special recognition at the Daring Radom competition hosted by the J. Kochanowski Theatre in Radom in 2005 and was later staged at the National Theatre in Warsaw. Her play Absinthe (2005) was presented at the Drama Lab Theatre in Warsaw under the direction of Aldona Figura.  Absinthe won the Second Place Prize at the R@port Festival of Polish Contemporary Art in Gdynia. Her play Trash Story, a drama, won the Gdynia Drama Award – one of Poland’s major theater prizes. Trash Story was also a finalist at the Stuckemarkt in Berlin (2012). In 2015, Trash Story had its US premier in Los Angeles and New York.

Zishan Ugurlu is a resident actress and director at La MaMa Theater and has worked extensively both in New York and abroad. She is the founding artistic director of Actors without Borders-ITONY. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA degree and holds a PhD. She is currently teaching at The New School University as an Associate Professor. She is the recipient of the prestigious Fox Foundation Fellowship granted by Theater Communications Group.

The play, directed by Jedrzej Piaskowski, had its premiere on April 6, 2017 at TR Warszawa.

Find more information about the Festival here!