Patty wins

Katarzyna Tórz, TEATR

Patty Diphusa in Almodóvar's stories from the 80s is a young, nonchalant girl - an international porn star - a postmodernist "more vulgar and less bombastic" embodiment of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the performance by TR, Patty (Ewa Kasprzyk) has a trait of a mature woman who by strobe lighting, as if in passing, analyses her whole life.
We can hear a loud screech of car brakes. At this moment Patty Diphusa, wrapped in an artificial leopard fur coat, arrives at the doorstep of the theatre and comes from the backyard at Marszałkowska street straight to the rehearsal room of TR. There is a sofa covered with soft, red cloth standing on a rectangle cut out of artificial grass. In the background, there is a curtain made of pleated maroon satin.

In this scenery - dressed in a very short elastic dress, fishnet stockings, plastic platform shoes, equipped with a pink wig and shimmering turquoise suitcase with a few indispensable bits and pieces (e.g. glass penis) - she speaks about herself for almost an hour.
Who is the "cousin" of freedom-loving Holly Golightly? Paradoxically, Patty embodies "a typical girl of our times" and "belongs to the women who never pass by unnoticed in the epoch in which they live".
She never sleeps, as "sleep would mean death to her". Supposedly, she never really believes in anything, treats nothing seriously, gets away with her own ridiculousness and overstatement performing the act of auto-creation. In this way she reduces her existence to an exciting show. Patty values independence, she is constrained by norms and standards, but also falseness which she can sense intuitively. She is intelligent, tries to develop her imagination, and cares about the versatility of mental and sexual experiments. She is "the most accessible woman in town", she has a sense of humour and nerve and knows that the combination of those two features brings luck.

Patty is often sensitive and - as she says - she is surprised for "we live in times in which there is no room for sensitivity". However, in her case this is a very peculiar sensitivity - emotionality exploding at times of loneliness. Solitude is an inevitable element of her life, e.g. when she sits on the red sofa listening to the warm voice of Harry Belafonte and recalls all the Christmases she avoided, or when she talks about the bag of prawns she got from a taxi driver she knows she seems like a little girl, deserted by all, who can admit her sentimentality bordering on exultation - in her case a weakness of character - only to herself.
The unbound narration, based on memories of pivotal moments from her life, is abundant with descriptions of events which may induce very different emotions in spectators. When Patty in absent-mindedness mixed with professional coquetry tells us she was brutally raped by two psychopathic men or recalls in great detail numerous erotic excesses, of which she was the heroine or initiator, she is at the same time moving and off-putting, touching and kitschy, sentimental and ruthless in her attitude towards people and the world. Most of all, however, her every gesture and word are permeated with auto-irony, distance from herself - her desires, ideas and thoughts. She often winks at the spectator, makes fun of her own behaviour and weaknesses.
Patty is not totally on her own in the performance. At one point a projection of Ewa Kasprzyk talking to Patty appears on the wall. Patty asks Kasprzyk who she is, what she likes and why she is not asleep. In the end, she learns that she is the figment of spectators'/readers' imagination, the embodiment of what they would like to be. The Patty we can see is supposed to be only a construct, a figure who was endowed with life and memory by a demiurge - director - author who, with the use of new technology, deprived her of real existence. The spectators who have been framed into the relations between Patty and the creator, have become equal participants in an eccentric game which is the whole performance. The audience consumes with pleasure the theatrical spectacle, the shower of colourful confetti, the disco-like chaos the actress plunges into.
This is Patty who bears the consequences of being herself, of living a risky life the substitute of which one sometimes wishes to taste, but only few are brave enough to undertake.
Patty is thus a representation of decadent dreams of escaping in love, erotisicm, unlimited freedom and fun, a representation which disappears as fast as it appeared. Patty's defeat shows in a moving scene when she removes her many centimeter long lashes, takes off her wig and as a sad, exposed clown reveals her true, fatigued face. Nevertheless the failure is only apparent and rather temporary because Patty will not give up quickly. She acts according to Gloria Gaynor's well-known hit I will survive ("I will survive as long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive"), which opens the performance.

Patty will win in more than one critical moment of her chaotic existence. She will put on yet another, newer and more desirable mask, will set her heart on new conventions and will feel excellent in them, she will enchant other men whose admiration will be even greater than that of their predecessors. Because Patty is invincible, as long as she has the passion and energy to love life, no matter how unpleasant it can be. Thus, she becomes part of the parade, one of the bizarre characters created by Almodóvar, who trapped in between extreme emotions, entangled in ambiguous love and erotic relationships look for new opportunities to express themselves and find their desires even if that means questioning social and moral order, iconoclasm and provocation.

The Patty Diphusa performance staged earlier in the club and gallery Le Madame is one of the most interesting offers among all those presented within the framework of the "Teren Warszawa" project. Ewa Kasprzyk created an excellent monodrama as Patty Diphusa - she was sincere, emotional and full of vigour. Her part was true to the core, it also reflected the atmosphere of Almodóvar's text. The creators of the performance, according to the author's intentions, interpreted stories about Patty in an unpretentious way - they did not fall into platitude and superficiality and, thanks to this, the performance is something more than yet another worthless interpretation based on the fame of the director from La Mancha .