Totentanz: Black Night, Black Death | Poland

Playwright Ishbel Szatrawska

Playwright: Ishbel Szatrawska

Translator: Soren Gauger

Director: Michael Mejia

Partner: Trap Door Theatre

Synopsis: March of 2020, Bergamo, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Francesca, a former model and her husband, Luca, a television host, have invited some neighbours to an illegal dinner. This innocent social evening gradually turns into a quarrel over the pandemic, Italy, European values, social solidarity, and political and ideological views in the crisis situation.

The play is built on structures drawn from commedia dell’arte: the protagonists come from various regions of Italy and personify the stereotypical attributes associated with dell’arte characters, yet the conflict rests on twenty-first-century divisions. Venetian wealth and Sicilian poverty, the refugee crisis in Lampedusa, immigrant labour, the breakdown of the health system during the pandemic, the collapse of faith in European solidarity—these are only some of the subjects the drama raises. The story of the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975 hovers over everything like a sinister omen—this was a homophobic and political crime that smacked of wild capitalism and the fascist history of Italy and Europe.

Yet two characters seem to belong to another world entirely. These are Salvatore, the equivalent of the dell’arte Dottore and his helper, Chiara, a young girl, a character who seems to be a mix of Arlecchino and perhaps an Italian Lisbeth Salander. It is they who ultimately take one of the guests into the underworld. Who are they? Etruscan gods? Messengers of Hades? A delirious dream of Claudia, who turns out to be a doctor in a Covid unit?

The play makes a wide range of references to Italian, European, and world culture. We encounter Pier Paolo Pasolini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Tarkovsky, Tarantino, even the opening words of the Comendatore from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and allusions to the Aeneid. The action is broken up by intermezzi—some take the form of television shows, others resemble musicals. There is also a grotesque parody of Wheel of Fortune, ending with the prize of a luxury coffin, and the performance of a medieval song that is an ode to Pluto, lord of the underworld.

In the finale the violinist dies, the bourgeoisie are ridiculed, the helpless doctors await international aid, and Chiara performs her contemporary song, which might be read as the triumph of death.

Comedy mixes with tragedy, mythology with the global problems of the twenty-first century. The Italian context turns out to be merely a costume for the challenges standing before most of the societies of the West.

Totentanz: Black Night, Black Death was a finalist for a Polish national award, the Gdynia Dramaturgical Prize, in 2021; it has been translated into English, German, Ukrainian, and Danish.

Ishbel Szatrawska was born in 1981 in Olsztyn. She is a playwright and theatre scholar. She graduated from the Jagiellonian University’s Theatre Studies Department, and studied film and  American culture at the same university and at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. In 2013–14 she studied at the private Multi Art Academy film school in Krakow under some renowned names in Polish cinema, including Xawery Żuławski, Jacek Bławut and Janusz Kondratiuk. In December 2019 she had her debut with the drama Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear in the Nasz głos e-anthology published by the National Stary Theatre in Krakow. Her subsequent dramas were published in Dialog magazine: Polowanie [The Hunt] in no. 4/2020 and Totentanz: Black Night, Black Death in no. 2/2021. In 2020 she received a City of Krakow Creative Scholarship, which allowed her to write the drama Kateriny brak [Katerina’s Absence]. She was named the winner of the DRAMATOPISANIE scholarship competition (2nd edition; 2021) organized by the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute. This scholarship enabled her to create the drama Wolny strzelec [Free Lancer] on the war in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A competition is currently underway to decide the public theatre that will get to stage this play. In 2021 she wrote the play Żywot i śmierć pana Hersha Libkina z Sacramento w stanie Kalifornia [The Life and Death of Mr. Hersh Libkin from Sacramento, CA]. The play was published by Wydawnictwo Cyranka in April 2022, making it her book debut. The Life and Death of Mr. Hersh Libkin from Sacramento, CA was selected among the plays in the international Eurodram 2022 contest. It's a selection that is made once every two years by a committee which recommends the chosen plays for translation. Totentanz was shortlisted in Stückemarkt contest as part of Theatertreffen – Berliner Festspiele 2022. She has lived in Krakow since 2000.

Soren Gauger is a Canadian novelist, translator, and essayist. He has translated such Polish authors as Bruno Jasieński, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Jerzy Ficowski, Dorota Masłowska, and Wojciech Jagielski into English, and freelances for wide array of theaters, art galleries and cultural institutions across Poland. He has published two volumes of his own short fiction in English (Hymns to Millionaires, Quatre Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus), and three novels in Polish, co-translated by himself. His essays have recently appeared in books on Andrzej Wróblewski and Paweł Bownik, and Opera Buffa Theater’s experimental travel magazine. He lives in Krakow with his wife, Magdalena, and his son, Milo.