It’s not often that theater lovers get a chance to watch a world premiere play with the award-winning playwright in the house, but British playwright Paul Webb was on hand for Friday at the Beverly O’Neill Theatre in Long Beach for the opening of “Warsaw.”
Webb, is a former professor who wrote his first play after 50, following a career in teaching and several years in the oil industry. His first play, Four Nights in Knaresborough, was produced in London, enjoyed a national tour, and drew the attention of the film industry.
He was subsequently commissioned by Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, and Ridley Scott, working closely with all three over a number of years. He wrote Selma, the 2014 film about the voting rights campaign in Alabama led by Dr. Martin Luther King. He later returned to theater, and Hold On! premiered at the St. Louis Black Rep in January 2024.
Warsaw, now receiving its world premiere at International City Theatre (ICT) in Long Beach, adds another chapter to a body of work defined by a fascination with history, moral consequence, and the individuals caught inside defining moments.
Directed by ICT artistic director caryn desai (sic), Warsaw is a confident and emotionally precise world premiere, the kind of regional theater work that reminds you why small houses still matter in today’s entertainment-centric world.
The small stage simultaneously allows and compels the actors to focus on their craft. No dazzling special effects, just the raw emotion of an old black-and-white movie as the complex story unfolds.
Suzanne Ford plays Krystyna, the woman fighting for her life. Anna Van Valin plays the doctor. Elias Scoufaras plays the doctor’s estranged fiancé. Spencer Del Carmen plays the truck driver. Bruce Nozick plays the priestly hospital volunteer who believes he once knew Krystyna long ago in Warsaw.
The play neatly holds a war, a love story, and a critique of the American health system in the same quiet room, and it does so with the economy of a talented playwright who knows that restraint, applied correctly, is the most powerful tool in the theater.
Webb has written a particular kind of story that uses a single, suspended moment, a body hovering between life and death, to excavate decades of buried history. Warsaw is a haunting new drama that is quiet on the surface, though seismic underneath, perhaps a chamber piece that uses the confined intimacy of a hospital suite to ask large, uncomfortable questions about capitalism, survival, love, and what we owe the people history forces us to leave behind.
The play evolves around Krystyna, a 72-year-old woman fighting for her life in a Brooklyn hospital following a car accident in the days just after September 11, 2001. As she lies in a medically-induced coma, four very different people are drawn to her bedside: a doctor, the doctor’s estranged (businessman) fiancé, a truck driver (who hit Krystyna after seeing a plane hit the World Trade Center), and a hospital volunteer who believes he once knew her long ago during WWII.
Webb’s unique technique unfolds the story in a marvelous sequential layering that unravels the impact Krystyna’s life has on each of them as they await the outcome of her medical predicament.
The playwright frames the power of love both as modern consequence in the way he resolves the dispute between the doctor and her fiancé and the powerful reunion between the older couple who had not seen each other since 1945.
According to Broadway World, Webb’s “Warsaw” wisely poses the question of whether choices made under duress, occupation, and terror, under impossible circumstances, can ever truly be forgiven or fully understood by those who were not there.
“Warsaw” runs through May 17.