A visionary playwright, novelist, painter, and philosopher, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, as he dubbed himself, committed suicide in 1939, just as Germany invaded his native Poland. Thirty years after his death, Witkiewicz was "rediscovered"--a dramatist who had created a theatre of the absurd decades before Beckett or Ionesco. Fittingly, many of his major plays (The Water Hen, The Madman and the Nun, The Mother) feature characters who come back from the dead.

Tony Peltier