Theatre of the Living Word

Stealing quietly through Kraków’s blacked-out streets, the audience and the actors who would perform for them arrived at an apartment in the city’s Dębniki district, across the frozen Vistula River from ancient Wawel Castle. It was the 1,181^st evening in the long, dark night of the Polish soul, and they took great care to avoid the armed patrols that enforced the Nazi Occupation’s curfew. For what they were doing was an act of defiance that, detected, would have sent everyone involved to the death camps. This particular night, November 28, 1942, the Rhapsodic Theatre, an avant-garde troupe committed to a “theatre of the living word” without props or elaborate costumes, was performing an adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz, a classic of the Polish Romantic tradition.

                 

The apartment blinds were drawn; the lights were lowered; a clandestine act of cultural resistance began. It did not go unchallenged. During the performance, Nazi megaphones outside began blaring the news of another victory by the invincible Wehrmacht. To some in the audience, that rasping, intrusive propaganda, interrupting a brief respite from the terrors of life in occupied Poland, seemed an apt metaphor for the hopelessness of their situation.

The twenty-two-year-old actor then speaking, an underground seminary student named Karol Wojtyła, paid no attention whatsoever to the racket outside. Unfazed, he continued his recitation as if the harsh static of the principalities and powers of the age simply did not exist…

                -an excerpt from George Weigel’s Witness to Hope, 1.