INTO THE FATHERLAND: A Company's Beginnings... Reflections from Warsaw

Editor’s Note: On Friday October 4th 2008, Taylor Graham and her new theater company, ATLAS Stage Productions Canada, embarked on their first Poland/Austria tour of George F. Walker’s “Theatre of the Film Noir.” Their goal? To administrate/tech a European tour having hardly seen a map of Poland. Oh, and let’s not forget… Two out of three coordinators know absolutely NOTHING about lighting, set or costume design! Join the gang right here on RoneBreak as they perform, drink and stumble their way around Europe. Ladies and gentleman, meet your new favorite blog-series: Into the Fatherland…

There’s something innately inspirational in the air. Feeling slightly off balance, yet reassured is becoming quite common place here. It’s that sort of the feeling, that innocent feeling you assume lost shortly after turning twelve, but here I sense it. I sense a charisma, a magic, a beginning, a lurking. Warsaw. There is such a spirituality to the atmosphere and not just in the shape of gigantic churches covered with gaudy fantastic Catholic idols and symbols. It’s in the people as they walk by. There’s a knowledge mockingly unknown to me here. Unknown to me, yet somehow available to me if I just learn how to play the game. Warsaw.

Magdalena’s parent’s apartment demands quiet comfort with its stark white walls and it’s clean simple nature. These white washed walls speak clearly to both this apartment’s thinly masked history and its great potential for future paint, art, and people to fill it. Somehow I can’t help but draw the obvious political similarities to Warsaw and Poland’s recent history. New and old seemed to merge and clash at the same time within the city’s limits. How much these boarders must have seen over the ages! They have attempted to recreate so much, which in itself tells you much about Warsaw in it’s own way. And how much is desired to come? I have read so much hope on the faces of all the tired old women and angry old men as they walk their city’s streets watching the beautiful youth live the life they fought to give them. I like to imagine what this apartment will look like after Magdalena spends a significant amount of time here after our adventure when she will live here all alone for a number of months. I like to imagine what she will create of this place she called home many years ago when she was a little girl living in Warsaw with her family. You can feel the walls imagining too.

As I wait for Magdalena to come into this room and tell me it’s time to get up, and as little Adrienne no doubt sleeps softly in her room just across the hall, I reflect on the events that brought me here. Brought me here today on this brisk October Monday in Warsaw so very far from my Toronto home.

Matt at the restaurant

Matt Drappel and I met in university, at York University in Toronto. I can’t seem to remember the first time we actually met, although Matt’s convinced it was the night he was invited by my roommate at the time, Andrew, to one of the large parties we frequently hosted in our apartment throughout those years. I do remember meeting Matt that evening, but something makes me feel as though we must have met prior to that. There may be a chance, however, I remember that feeling simply because Matt’s reputation preceded him as many of the acting conservatory actors’ reputations do in the hierarchical system of theatre students at York. Regardless of the way we first met, Matt quickly became a regular member of my rotating door policy apartment because of a common bond Andrew and him shared. This common bond produced daily clouds of happy happy smoke that circled our living room over a never ending, yet obviously greatly enjoyed tournament of cribbage. Matt and Andrew found nearly daily comfort in each others non-expressed young white man need for comfort from other young white men this day in age living in Toronto.

Because I enjoyed both Matt and Andrew’s simple comfort and have always been fascinated by male bonding, I often became a voyeur/occasional participant in their social ritual acted out in my living room. Immediately, I recognized that Matt and I were often on the same page when talking about this movie or that movie, or when gossiping about god knows who. When we weren’t on the same page we could at least agree to disagree and quickly I discovered how easy going Matt could be and how much I appreciated that sort of personality in my otherwise over-dramatized life at the time. We became friends both quickly and honestly. It also helped that I was good friends with his lovely girlfriend at the time. It made sense that we became friends, and as I soon discovered that friendship with Matt also included great loyalty. And with loyalty came opportunity if he thought you were worth the investment and could potentially reciprocate the generosity. Matt, it is safe to say, would often talk more than act, but the intention was true and I knew if a follow through came it would come in large scale.

Mirek and his son Peter

I’m jerked back to the present of Magdalena’s apartment where I was just informed to the fact that I have about half an hour before Mirek and his son, Peter, come pick us “the ladies” up as well as our luggage to begin our travels to Czestochowa, a smaller Polish city somewhere southwest of here. We just arrived Sunday, yesterday, in Warsaw and already our European tour will take us away from this place to prepare for the first of many terrifyingly unknown, yet excitingly unprecedented theatrical shows abroad. The thought of being able to have a show, this show in which I have anticipated so greatly actually make it to a European audience creates a lightness in my body, a lightness that I can largely attribute to one man: Mirek.

I do not have a clear idea of how old he exactly is (although his son, Peter’s wife is now pregnant with their first child which gives some clue), nor can I often line up his actions with his intentions, but Miroslaw Polatynski (or Mirek for short), is the wise, generous, and heated Polish actor turned director who has charted this adventure of art for the nine of us who will meet together tomorrow once again in Czestochowa. Mirek came to Toronto to study theatre in a foreign land, in a foreign language with foreign customs. I can only imagine his first English As A Second Language course in Toronto surrounded by the many nationalities that Toronto plays host and eventually home to each year, let alone what kind of challenges he faced in his first graduate level theatre direction class at York University. From these facts alone it is easy to ascertain that Mirek is a brave and immensely intelligent individual. He also has proven to possess a certain vision, a certain understanding that very few human beings would confidently pursue. I do not think I have ever met anyone along the path of my life thus far who has had the audacity to assume he knew enough about any given subject to teach, mold, and demonstrate to entire nations his opinions on said subject in which he feels so passionately about, while also investing much of his own money, time and resources into the project. Bless you Mirek. May the multiple Catholic Warsaw priests and all their many many nuns bless you Mirek for involving me and all of the other young eager faces involved in this project.

I have been given the ten minute warning to leave this lovely little apartment and I look around at my first resting place for my first night of drinking and jet leg in Poland. I smile to myself at the book cover image this apartment represents to me here, for at the end of this monthlong ride my Toronto bound flight will bring me here for another, most likely final time to sleep between these white white walls and white white sheets. But I suppose I am getting ahead of myself imagining the back cover of this story already, after all it is just my second day. I have a feeling there will be much in the body of this story anyway and already I sense I have left out so much in my lovely travelling companions’ individual personalities; in the moments we already shared as part of this theatre company; and my intimate thoughts, feelings, observations felt in Warsaw alone. But those will come a later day. Those will come. Now it is time to collect my things, thoughts, self and prepare to spend a undetermined amount of time enroute by bus to our journey’s next stop, enroute to Czestochowa and only God knows what . . .