[In the following review, Baranczak examines the style, central themes, and philosophical underpinnings of John Paul's plays.]

Two of the world's most powerful men were once actors. But only one of them was also smart enough to write his own lines. The appearance in English of The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater reminds us that before he became John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla's extraecclesiastic pastimes included not only philosophy, poetry, acting, skiing, and hiking, but also playwriting. To paraphrase Stalin, how many diversions does the pope have?

To be exact, Wojtyla stopped writing plays years before he moved to Rome. Between 1940 and 1964 he wrote six plays altogether, of which five have survived. Of these, three were written after he had become a priest. Only one, The Jeweler's Shop, was published (under a pseudonym) before his election to the papacy. Naturally all five were eagerly unearthed by the Polish Catholic publishing house Znak in the wake of the rejoicing in 1978, and were included in a volume of Wojtyla's collected poems and plays published in 1980. The poems have been available in English translation for several years; the present edition collects the plays and six brief essays on theater, all translated, annotated, and introduced with extreme care by John Paul's appointed English translator, the London-based poet and critic Boleslaw Taborski.

Though Wojtyla was virtually unknown as a playwright before 1980, dramaturgy was for him a more essential expression than poetry. As an eight-year-old he was involved with an amateur theater in his hometown of Wadowice; as a teenager he acted in some ten plays staged by his high school theater. After moving to Krakow and entering the university in 1938 (he majored in Polish literature), Wojtyla continued to perform with a semiprofessional theater group.

The outbreak of the war did not dissuade him from his literary and theatrical pursuits, even though the Nazi occupation forced Polish cultural activity underground. Working by day in a quarry and in a chemical factory, by night Wojtyla continued to study at the university, now clandestine, and to write poetry. In December 1939 he wrote his first play (eventually lost), David; in 1940 Job and Jeremiah followed. In these first years of the occupation he was also involved with an underground group of young actors, who staged plays in private apartments. These efforts were institutionalized, though still covert, after August 1941, when Wojtyla and his older friend Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk founded the Rhapsodic Theater in Krakow.

The Rhapsodic Theater was not just another clandestine form of keeping Polish culture alive. It was an artistic experiment aimed at creating a special “theater of the word,” in which scarcity of visual theatrical effect (a natural scarcity, under the circumstances) was part of a deliberate aesthetic. The performances were based on recitation rather than acting, and the repertory consisted of poems rather than plays. As Kotlarczyk put it, it was an attempt “to revolutionize theater through the word.“

Wojtyla took part in all 22 wartime performances of the Rhapsodic Theater. After 1946, when he was ordained a priest, his ties with the Theater became looser, of course, but they were never completely severed. On the contrary, he supported and defended the Theater throughout its postwar existence, which was particularly difficult during the years of Stalinism, until its final closure by the Gomulka regime in 1967.

The idea of a “rhapsodic theater,” or “theater of the word,” clearly informs Wojtyla's three later plays, Our God's Brother (1945-50), The Jeweler's Shop (1960), and Radiation of Fatherhood (1964). Compared with these works, his beginnings as a dramatist seem decidedly conventional. Job and Jeremiah, both written when he was 20, expose the workings of the young author's mind and show his familiarity with the Bible, and with the Polish Romantic and Neo-Romantic traditions, but they are not artistic feats in themselves. Job reflects on the problems of evil, suffering, and punishment, viewing Job's fate as a prefiguration of Christ's passion, and of mankind's martyrdom during the Second Word War. Jeremiah fuses biblical allusion with a segment of Poland's turbulent history in the early 17th century, thus creating a messianic vision of the nation's downfall and resurrection. Job is structured like a Greek tragedy, while Jeremiah is closer to Symbolist theater.

It is in their style, however, that both these plays are most marked by the future pope's attachment to a particular tradition, the choice of which was not exactly, well, infallible. Both plays, especially in the original, appear heavily influenced by the worst of the work of Stanislaw Wyspianski, the greatest Polish Symbolist playwright, namely his artificially elevated and pseudo-archaic language. These stylistic qualities are greatly toned down in Taborski's sensitive translation, but stiltedness remains. Job and Jeremiah were written by a 20-year-old sophomore, and in the Polish edition of Wojtyla's work both plays were listed as juvenilia.

The reader who opens this book in order to see the future pope's mind at work might well begin by reading Wojtyla's next play, Our God's Brother. As Taborski notes in his introduction, this play is unique if only because it doesn't happen very often that a playwright has the chance to beatify his play's protagonist. Wojtyla's lifelong fascination with the figure of the legendary Brother Albert (Adam Chmielowski, 1845-1916), a painter and political insurrectionist, protector of the homeless and founder of the order of Albertines, resulted first in his writing a play about him. More than 30 years later, his hero was finally beatified by the Church, and it was John Paul II who announced the event to one million people who came to hear him in Krakow during his second papal visit to Poland.

Our God's Brother opens the main chapter in Wojtyla's dramaturgy; it breaks with the conventions of Symbolist theater and offers a more innovative approach. The principles of “theater of the word” are already put into effect. The dramatic action and the stage movement are reduced to a minimum; the characters serve mainly as exponents of different ethical attitudes, presented in extensive philosophical exchanges. At the same time it is an example of what Kotlarczyk and Wojtyla called “inner theater.” As an attempt to “penetrate the man” rather than simply to illustrate the course of his life, the action takes place in the inner space of the protagonist's mind. The dramatic scenes (if that is what they are) occur as if they belonged to external reality, but in fact they are reminiscences played out on the stage of the hero's thoughts.

Wojtyla made a further step in this direction in his two plays written in the early 1960s, The Jeweler's Shop and Radiation of Fatherhood. These two plays mark a decisive shift toward the mystery play. Their protagonists are modern Everymen of both sexes, who meditate on the problem of their entanglement in the web of relationships with God and other humans, and ponder the fundamental mysteries of love, marriage, and parenthood. This is indeed a theater of the word, or an even more ascetic theater of ideas, one that tries to prove, as Wojtyla put it in one of his essays on theater, that “not only events but also problems are dramatic.”

Thus it is mainly the problem that “acts” here, while the actor serves mainly to “carry the problem.” The dramatic action is minimized even more than before; each play is actually composed of long monologues, which, though interrelated by their content, are monologues nonetheless. Taborski notes properly that these are not monologues of the Harold Pinter variety, where the isolation of utterances serves to stress the characters' inability to communicate. Rather, these are monologues merely because meditation can be done only in solitude. On another plane, though, these separate meditations form a universal dialogue that permeates the human and divine world, “a conversation of prayers,” as Dylan Thomas put it.

From a purely literary standpoint, Wojtyla's plays may provoke different reactions. Certainly not everybody needs this much seriousness and solemnity in art. But they should be required reading, along with his poems and philosophical writings, for anyone who wishes to understand the man, certainly for anybody who wishes to pass judgment on him. I don't mean that the plays clarify John Paul's specific ideas. (Although they do that too: Our God's Brother, for instance, contains a revealing discussion, of the problem of social injustice and revolution, which corresponds intriguingly with the pope's pronouncements in Latin America 30-odd years later.) I mean that they illuminate the character of this pope—particularly his open-mindedness, so seldom comprehended by those who are unwilling to see behind the rigid facade of the institution he represents.

Open-minded? The pope? I won't be surprised if I hear a roar of protest. The recent papal visit to this country, and its largely moronic coverage by the media, left behind two images of John Paul: a Great Communicator and a great guy, or a reactionary bogeyman who denies the benefits of progress to women and gays. Between the lawn sprinkler in the shape of the pope marketed by some fast-thinking entrepreneur (Let Us Spray, it was called) and the practice target of the left there is really not much difference: both are made of plastic.

Behind those flat images an infinitely more complex personality waits to be discovered. What we usually see is John Paul the former actor. We should also see John Paul the former playwright—someone for whom theater means not so much showmanship as dialogue. The mind of a man for whom the theater has been a primary means of expression can hardly be dogmatic. Even when he has shifted from plays to encyclicals, his outlook is still imbued with his recognition of the world's dramatic plurality. The playwright's natural element, after all, is dialogue, the confusion and conversation of our prayers.