Lupa at the Lincoln Center in NY

«Kalwerk (produced by the Stary Theatre in Krakow in 1992 and revived in 2003) will be the first Polish play ever featured during this prestigious festival. The play, staring Krzysztof Hadziaka and Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik is an adaptation of a story by Thomas Bernhard about a psychotic relationship between a scientist possesed by the vision of creating a study about hearing and his crippled wife.

The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is part of a larger complex of cultural uinstitutions on New York's Upper West Side. Beyond the LCPA, there are 11 other cultural and educational institutions there; amongst them the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, The Juilliard School, the New York City Ballet, and The New York City Opera. The center is where Americans are introduced to the best in world theatre, opera, dance and music. The summer festival is only one of many organized by the Lincoln Center. Yearly, there are about 400 performances featured here.

Lupa's Kalwerk will be performed alongside other European plays such as Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Ephem res, Lew Dodin's Life and Fate, Józef Katon's Iwanow, and many others. Critics agree however, that the biggest event of the festival will be Kalwer and the only plays with the potential to compete against Lupa's work will be German theatre works by Rene Pollesch or Christoph Schlingensief. Tom Seller, writing in the Village Voice, noted that Kalkwerk is "classic Lupa" while also questioning whether this excellent but difficult work would be understood in America. He suggested that it might have been more reasonable to bring over one of Lupa's "American themed" plays like Factory 2, which deals with Andy Warhol.»