Festen (The Celebration)

While the story (adapted by screenwriter Thomas Vinterberg), the structure, and much of the language remain true to the film–a family gathers to celebrate the 60th birthday of the family partriarch–“Jarzyna’s production, with its two long tables laid out at right angles, brings to mind not just Chekhov but a whole range of Shakespeare plays: Hamlet obviously, with its theme of buried family secrets, but even more specifically, Macbeth, with the sense of a ceremonial banquet thrown into disarray through the intrusion of ghosts from the past” (The Guardian).

The Village Voice has attributed to Jarzyna and TR Warszawa “the best international theater New York still needs to see,” and The Irish Times has praised the company’s “bold, precise theatricality and nerveless performances.” One of his country’s foremost directors, Jarzyna has revolutionized Polish theater, with a personal vision that boldly reinvents the classics and stages contemporary texts for a younger generation. He has brought a newly energized Polish theater to the streets of Warsaw–to discos, train stations, and underground clubs, and to DUMBO, where St. Ann’s Warehouse has brought two prior TR productions: Risk Everything (2004) and Macbeth (2008).