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Distinguishing Features is an intense, hallucinatory story about the journey of teen Alisha who, after using the “sickiest legal high on the market”, finds herself on the life and death threshold. Or, as other character puts it, it is a story called “Alisha in Nightmareland”. The structure of the text is based on the smooth transitions from the hospital’s reality to psychedelic world created in the girl’s mind.
Fadey is a first grader. He’s shy and has a stutter. He’d love to be a part of a group but the other kids in his class won’t accept him. It’s hard to tell why since they all have a struggle of their own: Charm can’t focus, Timmy D is frightful, and Little Miss Perfect has to always be the best in everything. It all changes once a new student – Candy, joins their class. The girl is blunt to a fault, can’t get any joke and has a short fuse. Now everybody turns on her instead of Fadey so he should be happy... but somehow he’s not.
1981. Janek is a caretaker in the Women’s Clothing Factory in Chorzęciny. This witty Casanova is a piece of a two-faced bastard. Thanks to his charisma and determination he’s able to wrap around his finger two women with strikingly different worldviews: Anna, a tailor and a member of the local division of “Solidarity”, and Wanda, a major in Security Service and a devoted communist. Janek cleverly hides the existence of “the other one” from his lovers – he has a thought-out strategy.
Jarosław Jakubowski’s The Funeral is a grotesque, mysterious, and irrational play. It follows the story of a person called Him, a middle-aged man, a husband of 10 years, a father who in a Kafkaesque style is baffled by the absurdity of the events around him. The play does not show the actual ceremony as it starts a few days prior. The plot of The Funeral is divided into two sets.
A group of individuals addicted to the Internet – Nikola and her lover Bruno, a couple Melania and Konstanty, a senior citizen Magda and a nerd Izydor – is taken to a secluded villa in the middle of a wood for an off-online rehab organised by the mysterious organisation called INFERNET. The driver Mikołaj takes off and leaves them stranded with no connection with the world. He ensures them that their coach will appear soon but just has to deal with something first. However, the coach does not show up and the group becomes more and more frustrated.
She and He – bound by love so overwhelming that they slowly lose the boundaries between their selves. They look through one another creating their intimate hymn. But with the passing months, scorching June turning into melancholic August, their love slowly transforms. The passion fades but does love vanish alongside it? Maybe the titular “awakening” is the realisation that in order to find oneself anew one must draw some boundaries?
Warsaw, 1930s. A married couple, a rabbi’s son and a daughter of a Jewish merchant, eat their Sabbath dinner, as they do every week. However, this time not only does Beniamin get home late from work and he refuses to eat his chicken soup – even though he should be hungry – but to add to that, Lea finds a lipstick smudge on his collar. The kids are sent outside and the couple decides to come clean and begins their marital discussion.
The play takes us to the 1962 Opole, specifically to Teatr Laboratorium (the Lab Theatre). The characters are based on the legends of Polish theatre: the Director, the Scribe, the Set Designer, and the actors and actresses. The team finds themselves in an artistic and existential clinch. The actors are tired with the side hustling, the poverty, the housing crisis, and the uncertainty of the future. Meanwhile the Director is trying to come up with an idea that would conquer Paris and then the world.
Small Duties is a shocking and daring poem about violence against women and social expectations of victims. It is a story divided into three parts: Revue, History, and Investigation. Its main characters are Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl, the so-called basement girls, who were imprisoned and tortured for years. After their release, they became a kind of macabre “celebrities.” They were judged, re-exploited by the media and pop culture, and subjected to social pressure.
Journalist Tom visits Professor Witz, a legendary researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He wants to talk about a project initiated by the professor in 2049 in the Łódź area, which has gotten somewhat out of control.
