Once again — because this performance has been staged for over thirty years, in New York, New Jersey, and American Czestochowa in Doylestown. This year’s edition was combined with a fundraiser for the renovation of the statue of St. Joseph in the church.
Not a spectacle — something else
It’s hard to call it a spectacle, because a spectacle implies a distance between the stage and the audience. Here, there is no such distance. Anyone who has been once knows — you enter the church, sit in a pew, the lights go out, and suddenly you are in the middle of it. You don’t watch the Stations of the Cross — you walk them. You don’t look at the crowd under the cross — you are that crowd. People around you cry and are not ashamed of it. An elderly woman in the first pew clutches her rosary. A teenager with a phone in her pocket doesn’t even look at it. Something is happening here that cannot be described by a theater review.
THEOS has been doing it the same way for years: live music, Polish poetry, projections of great masters’ paintings — and silence. A lot of silence. It is this silence that stays in your mind the longest.
The people who create it
Kasia Drucker sang in such a way that at some point you stop listening to the voice and start listening to what it stirs within you. Anna Kucay read the poetry of Brandstaetter, Bryll, and Baczyński — she didn’t declaim, she didn’t recite, she just spoke these words as if they were her own. D. Alan Jaymes played music that didn’t interfere — which in a church is an art in itself. And Tadeusz Nowak prepared multimedia projections in which Caravaggio and Rubens guided the viewer through successive stations of the Passion. Caravaggio’s painting “The Entombment” on the church wall at nine in the evening — that’s something that stays with you.
One performance canceled
This year, one of the planned performances — the one intended as a prayer for peace — was canceled. The organizers did not provide details. In the week when there was war with Iran and gas prices were breaking records, someone might say: “coincidence.” Someone else will say: a sign. The Mystery does not answer this question. It poses it: Quo Vadis, man? Where are you going?
Thirty years and still full pews
Over thirty performances in New York, New Jersey, and Doylestown. People return every year — some come from Connecticut and Pennsylvania specifically for this evening. This is not a tradition that dies with the older generation. Twenty-year-olds sit next to eighty-year-olds in the pews. The THEOS Mystery is one of those rare Polish diaspora events that effortlessly connect generations — because pain, hope, and silence need no translation.
Next edition — next year, during Lent. Those who haven’t been — should try. Those who have — know.
Editorial Staff, Głos Polonii w USA
Kasia Drucker, President – THEOS Theatre and Opera Society
Mystery “Passion and Resurrection — Quo Vadis, Man?” | March 22, 2026 | St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Church, Manhattan | Organizer: THEOS Theatre and Opera Society | Artists: Kasia Drucker (vocals), Anna Kucay (poetry), D. Alan Jaymes (music), Tadeusz Nowak (multimedia)
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