Recently, this last Monday, the young director Jan Klata, and respected, elder actor and professor Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, met on stage at the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw to discuss the conflict between "old" and "new" theater in Poland.

Zapasiewicz, who had earlier been very critical of "new theater" in an interview for the Polish daily Dziennik, noted that he understands that "new theater" is a bit like F1 race cars; they encorporate a great deal of advanced technology that is not used in regular cars; but that technology ultimately makes its way into regular cars in a modified form, thus enhancing them. Zapasiewicz argued that this is akin to an evolutionary view of technological development, and that this view can also be applied to theater in Poland, which has been evolving over the years. However, noted Zapasiewicz, the problem with "new theater" is that it is not evolutionary, but rather revolutionary, that it thinks it is in the right and old theater is in the wrong, that its' new audience must be the only audience served. Jan Klata countered that while "new theater" certainly does acknowledge and cater to a new audience, it has no desire to monopolize theater for itself. Zapasiewicz persisted in his ar