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Job in Warsaw
New York's Storm Theatre presents two plays written by a young Karol Wojtyla
Warsaw, 1944. A priest strides through the ruins of a church and proclaims, before God and whoever else is listening, an unusual offering: a play as a "prayer and a protest." It is the story of Job, dramatized from scripture by the young Karol Wojtyla, who was only 20 when he wrote the play in 1940, a day laborer in the quarries of Nazi-occupied Poland, not yet a priest.
So begins Storm Theatre's second Karol Wojtyla festival, dedicated to performing the early work of the young actor and playwright who became Pope John Paul II. This year's festival will also include "Jeremiah," which, like "Job," Wojtyla wrote before he was a priest.
In "Jeremiah," which opens Oct. 26, Wojtyla's protagonist is a Polish priest whose warnings to a recalcitrant nation mimic those of the biblical prophet. But where the biblical Jeremiah vainly admonished an unheeding Israel about God's impending judgment, Wojtyla's Father Peter is concerned with Poland. Culminating in the Cercora defeat, a 17th-century battle that ended Poland's centuries-long reign as one of Europe's most powerful nations, the play reflects Wojtyla's fascination with Poland's martyrdom to the later great powers of Europe.
The not-for-profit Storm Theatre is housed in a church off Broadway near New York's Times' Square. Peter Dobbins, the director of "Jeremiah" and Storm Theatre's principal founder, explains that when he founded the company in 1997, his intention was to have a "theater that would in some way lead people to God ... [and] be a more visceral emotional experience." The theater has produced works by Shakespeare, Chesterton and Pirandello, and though its productions are not exclusively Catholic or even religious, Mr. Dobbins remarks that the Catholic "way...