It’s their first time living, too.
Bertolt Brecht, Florian Zeller, Július Bárč-Ivan, Karel Čapek, Maxim Gorky – all of them are thematically connected by a single word, even in the title: mother. Their selflessness (even sacrifice), maternal love, and loss. But while their plays, at times, show the world through a mother’s eyes, 20 DEN, a production from the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw (Białystok branch), tells the story of the one without whom the mother would not have her title – the daughter. Puppeteer Julia Fidelus wrote, directed, and performed the piece as a monodrama.
She is not entirely alone on stage – she animates a puppet made from a pair of tights and a head, representing her mother. Tights frame the entire play – it begins and ends with them. At the beginning, the actress describes them as a symbol of her impeccably styled mother. They become not just a central element of the set and the puppet, but also a meaningful detail. When someone dies, we fear forgetting their voice, their scent… but in reality, we remember the tiniest things. Her mother used to say that a run in tights should be sealed with clear nail polish to stop it from spreading. She insisted that her daughter wear only one type of tights that flattered her legs. Perhaps the feeling of freedom – though not necessarily positive – that the daughter experiences after her mother’s death is the chance to put on different tights, not the ones her mother told her to wear. And maybe, finally, to look elegant, refined, and tall – like her.
But is it selfish to feel free after your mother dies? Or to replace her, start mimicking her behavior? The mother drank, so after her death, the daughter starts drinking too. The mother smoked – so the daughter smokes. How do the five stages of grief work when the mother only called when she needed something? Does acceptance come sooner when the sound of her steps on the stairs changes, because one foot has dropped out of rhythm, and she needs support, help to get off the ground? Going to the funeral elegantly dressed and saying “I love you, bitch” at the grave is one thing. But losing the title of daughter – that is the hardest thing. Harder than saying “I love you.”
Roles reverse. At first we think it’s a child crying, that the cycle continues, that the daughter has become the mother now that she has lost her own title. But it’s the mother crying. We owe our parents nothing – a rule everyone should be allowed to live by. But one day the roles change and we start caring for them. The actress brilliantly imitates the sound of a child’s cry – which we later discover comes from the mother puppet. Then comes cancer, regret, the early morning phone calls from university – because if the daughter called later, her mother might already be drunk.
So why the “I love you”? The mother was critical, rejecting her daughter, but she wasn’t insane. The actress portrays all of these heavy themes – and there are many of them packed into 45 minutes – with levity. The play contains many humorous moments. She loves her mother. We see beautiful scenes full of singing, of resting in a hot tub… but at the same time, we see that mothers are human too. They’re also living life for the first time. Every audience member will find a piece of their own mother in this character. Because no mother is perfect – sometimes they command, sometimes they criticize, but they teach us through their own mistakes. Sometimes they say no, but they’re also the ones who call first.
The performance doesn’t try to create sentiment, melancholy, or anxiety about future loss. It’s an honest, open-minded reflection, inspired by the novel Bezmatek by Mira Marcinów, about this particular kind of grief. At one point, the actress steps up to the microphone and reads a eulogy for her mother from a sheet of paper. She appears utterly natural. Her performance is incredibly believable. Tears well up in her eyes – and ours. The play doesn’t prepare you for this kind of loss, but it touches you. Because this is something no one can avoid. But people we love don’t die. Because to love someone is to say: “You will not die.”
From the author’s point of view, perhaps she loses the title daughter, but she doesn’t lose her navel – the part that once connected her to her mother. Just as the mother was marked by the scar from the C-section. A part of her mother still lives within her – in the advice she’ll keep following, in the bad habits she’s inherited, in the pain she still feels despite acceptance.
The actress and director is an incredibly talented student. Alone on stage, she manages to spark a wave of emotion with nothing but her performance. She switches seamlessly between the voices of the mother and daughter, she controls the puppet, she uses the full stage, and she holds the audience’s attention throughout. The set supports her with just a bathtub and tights. The tub becomes a grave, a hiding place, a hot tub. She works with its acoustics, tapping on it to create the sound of high heels on stairs. She hides beneath it, cries out from within it – but we don’t know that yet. The surprise comes when her voice doesn’t emerge from afar, as it may seem, but from underneath the tub, from that tight, suffocating space where she calls for her mother. But the mother never comes. And that is what crushes her – like the claustrophobic darkness.
This performance won’t prepare you for the loss of a mother – and it doesn’t try to. It doesn’t offer a way to cope. It simply reminds us that every mother is different, and yet somehow, all mothers have something in common. They are our friends, our teachers. They are a part of us, and we are a part of them.
