What scares us today in the “Haunted Manor”? Is a society with the experience of war written in its genes capable of producing the right defence mechanisms against the present-day perils? What is the source of our collective anxiety?

Taking advantage of the patriotic/emancipation context of one of Poland’s most famous operas, written by Stanisław Moniuszko, this play tackles the theme of the body—demonstrating, dismembered, crippled, haunting and repelling, and perhaps carrying unconscious, deeply-rooted phobias.

Images of events from Polish history take their toll on the inhabitants and guests of the “Haunted Manor.” They hold onto the past rooted in the veteran’s body, forming his constitution. At the same time, the body, through its deformities, misshapenness, deconstruction, and scars, carries the past inside and perpetually cultivates it.

This play will be the flip side of Moniuszko’s opera, an effort to reconstruct the strands making up the “Haunted Manor”; by the same token, it is a critical look at our historical education that traumatizes generation after generation. The Polish afterlife hovers in the shadow of the opera world, a dark museum of martyrology in which family portraits can, indeed, come to life and haunt.