By Michael Phillips
Tribune theater critic
Published November 3, 2004

A year ago, Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre hosted the American debut of a dazzlingly good Polish company, Teatr Cogitatur. The troupe presented "Aztec Hotel," in which angels and humans intermingled in a dreamscape of arresting visual delights. This was work as strong, or stronger, than most other international companies coming through North America, on much bigger budgets, at much better-funded operations.

Over the weekend, the company returned to the Chopin with a more daunting 1997 piece, "Four Dreams of Hoelderlin," inspired by the life, desperate love and madness of the German poet Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843). It was tougher, more allusive, than "Aztec Hotel." But it was no less exquisitely rendered. Chicago may be in the thick of a French theater festival. "Four Dreams," however, constituted a one-production Polish theater festival nicely counterweighing all the French business.

"Four Dreams" worked with no straight narrative and assumed a certain degree of Holderlin familiarity I, for one, did not possess. It didn't matter.

The production, under an hour in length, began with the auditorium in near-blackness. The light then revealed a bearded, glassy-eyed poet (Marek Radwan), talking about characters and creatures he imagines. His "dream book" appeared in a milky pool of light upstage, the pages of which magically turned under their own power. Right there you thought: I am in the hands of first-rate artists.

New actors emerged from the void. A man climbed a rope ladder to the heavens. A woman on the other side of the stage ascended a ramp, at a glacial but mesmerizing pace. Each new image shimmered. Then: cries of "Revolution!" Like so many other revolutions, this one led to the taste of ashes in the mouth. Holderlin experienced the French Revolution first-hand as a crushing violation of principles. One line expressed the whole of humankind's need for revolutions in the first place: "I have my dignity, but my stomach is empty."

"Four Dreams" was worth seeing if only for its final, grim burial of the revolution, and more literally, of Holderlin. As Radwan lay on the stage floor, just inches from the front row, two separate piles of dirt showered him, from an unseen container. I don't know if I've ever seen a theater company use darkness more imaginatively.

The company this visit consisted of Radwan, Marta Kadlub, Magda Fasinska-Malik and Maciej Dziaczko. Director Witold Izdebski's wife, Katarzyna Pryc, appeared last year in "Aztec Hotel" but more recently suffered a serious accident in Poland. Here's wishing the company a return visit soon.