We regret that the lecture scheduled for Jan. 29, 2026, has been canceled, due to speaker illness. We apologize for any inconvenience and will explore options for rescheduling this talk for a future date.
About the Lecture: Witold Gombrowicz is Poland’s most produced playwright around the world—and more performed abroad than in Poland itself. His first play Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is the most-produced Polish play of all time outside of Poland. Gombrowicz’s theater leads a double life: it has always been simultaneously performed in the most “classical” established institutional settings and embraced by the theatrical avant-garde. His writing also crosses an astonishing variety of performance genres, including film, radio, opera, and dance.
At the same time, no playwright was so deliberately distanced from his own work in performance. While both outspoken politically and courageously open regarding sexuality and desire, including his own, he demonstrated a profound avoidance behavior around the concrete theatrical embodiment of his writing. The inevitable mutability of a performance text in the organic collaborative process of theatrical creation generated a unique phobia and even panic in the writer, even as such interhuman mutability was integral to his artistic, psychological, and philosophical originality and global success. At the same time, no writer has inspired such wild proliferations of the imagination in theater artists around the
About the Speaker: Allen Kuharski is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in Theater at Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia, where he taught directing, performance theory, and theater history. He is also part of the MFA faculty of the Pig Iron School of Devised Performance in Philadelphia (affiliated with Rowan University in New Jersey), and has taught theater in China since 2021. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar in theater to Poland: first studying scenography with Józef Szajna at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1981) and second studying the history of Polish Romantic theater and drama at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in Warsaw (2017-18). Kuharski co-founded and co-directed a study-abroad program in Poland for Swarthmore theater and dance students in collaboration with Jacek Łumiński and Silesian Dance Theatre in Bytom. He is a widely published authority on contemporary directing theory and practice, as well of Polish theater and drama, in particular the work of Witold Gombrowicz.