“The Madman and the Nun explores” the tyranny of society over the individual as well as the boundaries of sanity. Sound familiar? The play can be seen as an absurdist comedy in which science, religion, and the state form a totalitarian alliance to bring about enforced happiness and social tranquility by means of psychiatric confinement. It is “dedicated to all the madmen of the world.”

In Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s “The Madman and the Nun” (1923), Walpurg, an acclaimed poet, is bound in a straitjacket in an insane asylum, his voice silenced by an even more insane bureaucracy of scientists and religious authorities. Whether Walpurg is a visionary or a hack is irrelevant, for in Witkiewicz’s view, any artistic impulse “happens almost always on the very edge of madness.” The asylum is run by lunatics. A nun is a creature of carnal passions. Murder is a cure for a murderer’s madness. “The Madman and the Nun” is about an artist’s struggle to maintain his sanity in an insane world.