Zdunik, Michał

Isaac’s Return by Michał Zdunik begins where the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac usually falls silent. Abraham returns from the mountain, but Isaac is not yet home. Sarah waits, convinced that her son has been sacrificed. She thinks about his room, his clothes, his bicycle, the empty place at the table, and a life in which he will no longer be present. Abraham announces that Isaac is alive: an angel stopped the knife, and a ram was sacrificed in his place. The father wants to eat. The mother wants to see her son.

Zdunik transposes the myth into a contemporary home. There is dinner, an oven, television, a dog in the yard, news about taxes, riots, and burning suburbs. Into this ordinary setting comes a situation that cannot be accepted: the father was ready to kill his son because he believed that God demanded it. Abraham speaks of obedience, trial, and reward. Sarah asks about Isaac’s fear and about how they are supposed to go on living after what has happened. The most important realization comes very early: Isaac did not see God then; he saw only his father with a knife in his hand.

When Isaac returns, there is no reconciliation. He is covered in earth, dust, and blood. Abraham tries to restore normality: he tells him to wash himself, sit at the table, and eat dinner. Isaac is silent at first, but during the prayer he begins to speak. His thanksgiving for being saved turns into an accusation. He recalls that in the morning he was supposed to be the sacrifice, and that his body could have been lying on the mountain, waiting for vultures and wild dogs. He asks his father whether there was truly not even a moment of pleasure, power, or a sense of strength in him when he held the knife over his own child.

The greatest reversal comes in the Credo section. Isaac reveals that he took a DNA test. He used Abraham’s toothbrush, sent the sample to a laboratory, and collected the results on his way back from the forest. Abraham is not his biological father. This discovery tears apart the entire story of the divine trial. Abraham was supposed to sacrifice his son, but it turns out that he wanted to kill a boy whom he had raised as his own, even though he was not his father. Isaac no longer accepts either the family or the religious order. He tells Abraham: “we are strangers to each other.”

Sarah then reveals the truth about the marriage. Abraham could not come to terms with his own infertility and his obsession with the son promised by God. He forced sexual intercourse upon her, beat her, raped her, and treated her body as an instrument for fulfilling a divine promise. After one particularly brutal night, Sarah went to Nahor, Abraham’s brother. He became Isaac’s biological father. The religious story of a son miraculously given by God turns out to have been built on rape, violence, infertility, lies, and a desperate attempt at rescue.

After Sarah’s confession, Abraham shows no remorse. He strikes her, insults her, and plans to keep her in domestic servitude. With Isaac, he once again attempts to turn violence into grace: since the boy carries the blood of the family and was raised as his son, Abraham wants to “accept” him and keep him. But Isaac now understands that his father does not need a son; he needs confirmation that he has been chosen by the Lord.

The finale is a double reversal of the sacrifice. Sarah gives Abraham the ram’s meat and waits for him to take the first bite. Abraham does not know that he has been poisoned. Isaac returns with a shotgun, but he does not kill his father. He kills himself, in order to deprive Abraham of grace, authority, and his place within the community. He wants his father to live as a man who has driven his son to his death. Abraham begins to choke. Sarah refuses to save him and tells him to beg God for help, since he once believed that God sent angels at the most important moment. This time, no angel comes.

After Isaac and Abraham die, Sarah remains. She prays, but her prayer can no longer sustain faith in its former shape. She asks whether a son who has taken his own life can attain glory, and whether a mother who killed the father will ever see her child again. And then she has to return to her chores: wipe the traces of brain matter from the floor with a wet cloth, put the meat in the refrigerator, take out the rubbish. After the language of sacrifice, obedience, fatherhood, and divine trial, what remains is a weeping mother cleaning the house.

Isaac’s Return is a drama about what happens after a miracle if the miracle does not heal violence. Isaac returns alive, but his return does not restore the family. On the contrary, it unleashes the truth about a home in which religious language has concealed the father’s power over his wife’s body and his son’s life. Zdunik asks what obedience to God means when it is carried out by a man who has long been accustomed to violence.

The Unfinished Violin Concerto by Michał Zdunik is a drama inspired by the life of Józef Chasid, a Polish-Jewish violinist, child prodigy, student of great teachers, and artist whose career was cut short by mental illness, the catastrophe of war, and the brutal practices of psychiatry at the time. From the outset, however, the author makes it clear that he is not writing a documentary play. He draws on historical sources, but transforms them into an autonomous work: a stage fantasy in which facts return as voices, fragments of recordings, hospital reports, family conversations, and the sounds of the violin.

The drama begins in long, dark corridors. Józef does not know where he is, cannot remember his own name, tries to open one door after another, and searches for people who “were once here” and then disappeared. He is accompanied by the Guide, whose lines are intended to be sung. The Guide gives Józef a violin and tells him to play, because only sound can open the next passage. When Józef draws a few pure notes from the violin, the first doors open, and the journey through his life begins.

The subsequent scenes do not form a straightforward biography. Zdunik constructs the drama like a fragmented recording or a score of memory. Józef finds himself in a radio studio, hearing the voices of critics enthralled by his talent yet tinged with antisemitic hostility.

Other voices restore his family to him. Judith and Leon speak of childhood, poverty, their mother, their father, and separation. His father took Józef to Warsaw because the boy was destined to become a great musician. The rest of the family remained behind with their ill mother. In the background, the Holocaust emerges: Chasid’s relatives burn in a forest; they are “still missing, though already dead,” with no graves and no certain place of death. Józef does not recognize them, but feels that they are “somewhere inside him.” He tries to play Bach’s Chaconne for them.

Alongside this, the hospital story returns. Józef is in Long Grove Hospital in Epsom. The doctors sing about insulin, restraints, injections, hypoglycemia, the diagnosis of dementia praecox, and later also electroconvulsive therapy.

One of the most important figures in the drama is Józef’s father, Owsiej Chasid. He was the one who saw a miracle in his son and subordinated the boy’s life to his own plans, poverty, travels, education, relationships with teachers, and concert halls. He is not portrayed as a straightforward villain. He loves his son, believes in his exceptional nature, and wants to save him from the world. At the same time, he is incapable of releasing him from the role of the child prodigy who is expected to play, validate the meaning of his sacrifices, and compensate for the family’s losses. In a conversation with a doctor, the father learns that Józef will probably never recover, and confesses that he himself is dying of stomach cancer. He wants to hear his son play one more time. Józef tries to play Brahms’s Violin Concerto, but the phrase stalls and repeats like a worn-out record.

 Elizabeth also appears in the drama, a girl remembered from his youth and associated with one of Józef’s brightest memories. She leads him to a studio containing a piano, tapes, microphones, and recordings. She asks him to play on her hand as he once did. Massenet’s Meditation from Thaïs, one of Chasid’s most important recordings, then begins to sound. For a moment, the sun, the body, love, and the possibility of another life return. But this scene, too, falls apart.

Zdunik continually confronts the living human being with his archive. Radio broadcasts carry announcements of concerts, reviews, reports of performances, the names of conductors, recording dates, expressions of admiration for the young violinist, and finally a notice of his death. Chasid’s fame is assembled from announcements, programs, and fragments of press coverage, yet these voices are unable to halt either the illness, the loneliness, or the loss of his family.

The final scenes take the form of a last examination and a final report. Professors and voices of memory order Józef to enter the circle; they return to his education, conservatory records, competitions, teachers, and the absence of his relatives’ recovered bodies. Józef tries to play, but the sound is now only the ghost of sound. His death is then set out in detail: complications following a prefrontal leucotomy, purulent meningitis, the coroner’s decision, his burial at East Ham Cemetery, the grave measured out by the gravediggers, and the fifteen pounds left behind.

The Unfinished Violin Concerto is a drama about an artist whose life was written down by others: by his father, critics, doctors, the press, archives, death records, and the history of wartime violence. But it is also a drama about the fact that memory does not return in the orderly form of a biography. It returns as sound, a broken phrase, a voice that is misidentified, a body bound in restraints, a name read from a file, a melody that can no longer be played to the end. Zdunik does not reconstruct Chasid’s life point by point. Instead, he makes him pass through the voices that created him, loved him, used him, diagnosed him, and mourned him, until finally all that remains is the mother, the river, and the home.

“Detailed Theory of Life and Death is a polyphonic play written initially for the radio; it consists of the voices of the living and the dead. It tells the story of Jan and Antonina Żabiński, who were hiding Jewish people in the Warsaw ZOO, of which they were directors. Zdunik, instead of writing a traditional storyline, created a polyphonic structure, which resembles a score with many voice parts; a kind of improvised radio broadcast, in which we can hear a speaker and an author himself, struggling with his own work of art. Apart from that, Zdunik is far from preserving the myth of Polish heroism, brought up a little while ago by the Hollywood movie about the Żabińskis, starring Jessica Chastain as Antonina. For him, the Żabińskis’ story differs depending on the current storyteller’s background and experience. Zdunik treats theater and drama as a one of a kind medium.”

− Jacek Wakar, introductory essay to Polska jest mitem. Nowe dramaty anthology

• The play was published in Polska jest mitem. Nowe dramaty in April 2019 by Agencja Dramatu i Teatru ADiT.
   

A modern version of Antigone. It consists of two parts, each character has two incarnations: one living in the present and one mythological, which is an archetype, a character’s progenitor living in a poetic timeless realm.

The first part takes place in the realistic world, in the institute of classical philology within a huge university. Intertwined monologic and dialogic forms are sometimes disrupted by choir parts and by lines delivered by archetypical characters from the original ancient myth. The main character, Antigone, despite having a young boyfriend Haemon, has a romantic liaison with one of the Ph. D. students (Polynices). When the lovers are finally exposed, the director of the institute – Creon – decides to expel Polynices from the university, in spite of Antigone’s and her sister Ismene’s fierce protests. His decision will have tragic consequences, predicted by the plain janitor called Tiresias.

This complex play is based on a contemporary free verse and colloquial speech; its main focus lies in the matters of corporeality and how it is bounded by the cultural rules, behavioural patterns and language (in this case represented by the academic society). This factors constrain the body and impede realizing its full potential. Words overrule the matter, suppress the desire and the intuitive need of love – shared also by the ancient Antigone, who, all in all, “was born to share love, not hate”. Those two realities cannot be merged together, they will always be distant from each other, even antagonistic. To quote Michel Foucault: “The soul is the prison of the body”.

Dolls - Michał Zdunik's debut play - is a story of a woman who, led astray by illusions, decides to adopt all abandoned children. She begins her monologue, in which many different "voices" clash, representing different speech registers, press and literary genres. It is a portrait of a person lost in schizophrenia, without a coherent identity, with a completely broken up personality, but also a picture of a woman and womanhood in the modern world. There are excerpts from newspapers, fragments of colloquial conversations and TV reports, constantly repeated conventional phrases and so-called "common wisdom".

The main protagonist of the play is the language - deconstructed, carried to the limits of absurdity in its fossilized, media and dialoguing forms, arranged in a musical, strongly rhythmic structure. Dolls can be sung, chanted, shouted, you can let yourself be swept away by a deluge of words hiding a real tragedy underneath. It is so difficult to reach it today - it is constantly erased by everyday gibberish, clickbait phrases, and the noise of conversations. They hide the real drama of women, who must be artificial, socialized, enslaved. Like dolls.

What if camera operators from the TV studio, not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, were the heralds of the Last Judgement? And what if the TV show host replaced archangels?Or if we got blinded by the spotlights, not by the mighty lightnings?

Until the Very End is an ironic, slightly profetic play, combining realistic and poetic features. There are two mothers without their offspring: a son, who is lost and a son, who comitted suicide. There is a doctor who discovers his future by accident, and a bored, jaded psychologist. And they all talk. They talk and talk, encouraged by the Host: “Speak, it will help you”. Their stories seem to connect with each other more and more clearly. Characters confess their secrets, though their public confessions are shallow and superficial. Exhibitionism, such popular on TV, deprives them of dignity.

There is also a choir, resembling an antique one, but with a very modern touch. It comments characters’ deeds in an ironical manner. This is the moment before the Last Judgement. People confess their sins not only to the highest majesty, but also to themselves. In a moment the Judge will come in – he will anounce the verdict of “Stairs behind the Glass” TV Show. Will the contestants go up or down? But, contrary to expectations, the Judge will never show up. He is like theBeckettian Godot – always silent and distant.
Zdunik points out the tackiness of suffering depicted in the media. In this particular case, the suffering does not make one seem dignified – since itis bland or sometimes ridiculous. Until the Very End mocks ubiquitous emotional exhibitionism. What will happen if the most important Viewer doesn’t show up? Well, there is a long line of participants, waiting to reveal their uttermost secrets…

An empty cinema hall. The young man came here to mull over his life – unfulfilled hopes, lost love, unaccomplished plans. His reminiscences resemble the narration of a film. The man summarizes its action, however, it takes place only in his imagination. There are numbers from 10 to 1 displayed on the screen – this countdown will set the rythm of the drama, comprised of 10 scenes.

At the very beginning his monologue is disrupted by the entrance of a beautiful girl – his long lost love. Is she real or is she only a figment of his imagination, like an image on the screen? The monologue turns into a dialogue, in which characters evoke their past. They speak in a „film” manner – as if they were directing a movie here and now – casting actors, positioning the camera, choosing music score and also quoting famous films. Perhaps we are not able to tell our stories otherwise than through visual and narrative cliches.
There are a lot of staging possibilities – especially in the use of new media, i.e. video projections, which may become an integral part of the performance and complement the narration (which is based on both visual and verbal components, after all).  
 

This is a play based on a true story about a man who hid his narcissism under the mask of a self-proclaimed messiah. A charismatic priest manipulated women and, having gained their trust, sexually abused them. The young monk preys on the loneliness of his female listeners and their sense of alienation. He notoriously leads them astray theologically, arouses a sense of guilt in them ('you did not pray earnestly enough'), makes them dependent on him by using various manipulation techniques. It is a response to the silence of God.

After some time, the Messiah achieves his goal – he rapes the women, telling them beforehand that this is the only way to cure them of the sin of impurity. The Messiah revels in his sense of superiority, although in conversations with Church dignitaries and the congregation, he presents himself as a martyr who takes on the burden of alleged sins. In the meantime, the shameful practices intensify:

He brought her salvation."

The manipulated followers nip their doubts in the bud – they have given too much to this man, so they rationalise their behaviour and suppress their emotions. Besides, they have to deal with the society’s judgement:

The situation of the victims is worsened by a curious (in the text accompanied by a large dose of ironic humour) investigation conducted by the Church’s representatives. Gradually, however, they regain their voice.

Zdunik juxtaposes fast-paced dialogues and monologues, in which biblical language and poeticism mix with the obscene:

The author creates a space for the victims, for women; nevertheless, in the finale the female characters ask rhetorically if people will actually be ready to listen to the apostles of the new truth.