Between the Rhapsodic Theatre and the Theatre of Inner Self. The Power of the Word(s) in Wojtyla’s Jeremiah and Radiation of Fatherhood

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I would like to have a closer look at one of Karol Wojtyla’s earliest plays, Jeremiah, and the last drama he wrote—Radiation of Fatherhood. The former is set in the 17th century Poland with protagonists based on historical figures; the latter takes place in the unidentified present; one is subtitled “A National Drama”, the other is “A Mystery”. Though written twenty years apart, those plays show that Wojtyla’s experiments with the dramatic form were motivated from the beginning by the question of the human person in relation to the Word and mediated through words. The inward turn that is taking place in-between his first and last play can be well shown by the analysis of the categories of time and space, and the way those works refer to the Trinitarian and Paschal Mystery and the sacrament of Baptism.

Katarzyna Dudek is an Associate Professor of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Austria Program. She completed her PhD at Warsaw University. Her main interests are focused on the 19th and 20th century poetry of religious experience and the intersection of literature, theology and philosophy. She has published a monograph Vanishing Voices. Silence(s) in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas (2019) and is currently co-editing a collection of essays Phenomenology of Christian Imagination.