The annual Warsaw Theater Meetings festival will be held for the 36th time April 14-27, featuring some of the best plays staged in Poland last year.

The festival comprises nine performances selected from among productions staged by theaters across the country. Festival viewers will see plays directed by some of the biggest names in Polish theater, including Krystian Lupa, Michal Zadara and Grzegorz Bral.

This years’s event will be divided into Big Theater Meetings, Small Theater Meetings, and a number of extra events. The festival will kick off with Plac Bohaterów (Heroes Square), directed by Lupa and staged by the National Dramatic Theater from Lithuania. Before it opened in March last year, the play was hailed as the theater event of the year in Lithuania.

Audiences will then see a famous production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), staged by the Polski Theater from Wrocław and directed by Zadara. Mickiewicz was a leading Polish Romantic poet who also wrote plays.

The Narodowy Stary Theater from Cracow is bringing Anton Chekhov’s Platonov, directed by Konstantin Bogomolov and starring male actors in female roles and women in male roles. Warsaw audiences will also see Elfriede Jelinek’s Śmierć i dziewczyna (Death and the Maiden), whose staging by the Polski Theater from Wrocław raised a lot of controversy when director Ewelina Marciniak cast two porn actors in cameo roles.

The 36th Warsaw Theater Meetings cater to the tastes of both traditional audiences and those who like theatrical experiments. As in previous years, along with plays for adult audiences, the festival will feature nine plays for children, including Księga dżungli (The Jungle Book), based on the Rudyard Kipling novel. Kids will also see an actor-and-puppet play entitled Noc bez księżyca (A Moonless Night). Based on the same-titled book by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, this staging employs gestures and sound.

Other events held as part of the Warsaw Theater Meetings will include a selection of plays staged by Warsaw’s Dramatyczny Theater, in addition to Patrz sercem (See with Your Heart), an exhibition of paintings inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

This year’s Warsaw Theater Meetings coincide with the international Year of Shakespeare, prompting the organizers to treat audiences to a best-of selection of Shakespeare plays recorded over the years for Polish Television Theater. The archival television productions will be screened on the Dramatyczny Theater’s Halina Mikołajska stage. In the foyer, the theater will be staging an exhibition entitled Szekspir. Plakaty (Shakespeare: Posters) and featuring theater posters by some of Poland’s finest poster designers such as Jan Lenica and Waldemar Świerzy.

The festival performances will be staged at four Dramatyczny Theater venues in Warsaw as well as the Studio Theater, the Expo XXI exhibition center and the ATM Studio.

Held since 1965, the Warsaw Theater Meetings festival is one of the oldest theater festivals in Poland. After an eight-year hiatus, the festival was relaunched in 2008 and proved a hit with audiences.

The 36th Warsaw Theater Meetings festival has been organized by the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw.

Tickets are available at Dramatyczny Theater ticket offices. For further details and the festival program, go to www.warszawskie.org