Jozef Szajna's Replika

Extract

The expressionistic images that Jozef Szajna employs in his production of Replika have their roots in the World War II concentration camps of Poland, where the Polish director was sent when he was seventeen. This past spring he brought his production to the Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, from his Teatr Studio in Warsaw. It played March 12 through April 2. Szajna commented that “the concentration camps were my university.” After he was freed, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he began “to re-examine what we call acting in the theatre.” He soon found that the theatre itself had become another concentration camp. “It was the pop art that was created by the Fascists: hair, shoes, limbs, dolls, naked people.”