Peter Marks writes about The Divine Comedy in Kraków and the National Stary Theatre in the prestigious American Theatre magazine.

“I think the stories we make can make the world better,” the endlessly inventive Polish stage director Jakub Skrzywanek said to me over lunch on Sunday during Kraków’s Divine Comedy Festival, one of Europe’s most adventurous annual theatre events.

He was taken aback at how eagerly I opened my notebook to scribble down the thought. It occurred to me in that moment how desperately I’d needed to hear those words, at a time of political tumult and performing-arts contraction back home in the U.S. It was the reason, too, I’d come back to the festival for the third year in a row: to feel connected and challenged anew to an art form that country after country claims as its own. And in each country this ownership is expressed in ways that nourish and expand the mind, and heart.

Poland, with a storied theatrical past that counts among its giants the likes of Jerzy Grotowski and, more recently, Krystian Lupa, is one of those nations.

Other Americans came too, as part of a delegation organized by the Center for International Theatre Development, founded by the late, great Philip Arnoult. Among the contingent’s 14 members: Tamilla Woodard, who heads the acting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama; Mei Ann Teo, an artistic leader at Ping Chong and Company; playwright Carlos Murillo; Reg Douglas, artistic director of Washington’s Mosaic Theater Company; and Lisa Portes, chair of theatre and dance at UC San Diego.

This is the first of my dispatches as we ricochet from show to show. The juried festival, ending on Dec. 15, consists of nearly two dozen productions, virtually all from Poland, curated by director Bartosz Szydłowski, who also runs his own company, Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, in nearby Nowa Huta. My chronicle is intended both as a record and an appeal to an American culture more prone these days to gazing inward, at a time when our ties to world theatre already feel inadequate and too sporadic”.

On December 10th, on the New Stage, we will present The History of Sin, directed by Wojtek Rodak. Additionally, at the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków, Man of Paper. Antiopera on a Loan directed by Jakub Skrzywanek, will be performed. Both plays will include English subtitles.