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'AND I DANCED WITH NIETZSCHE … ' Play in four movements

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Eva Cybulska
Free Spirit
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 ‘AND I DANCED WITH NIETZSCHE … ‘
Play in four movements
By Eva M. Cybulska

Synopsis

Magdalena, an ambitious scholar in her mid-thirties, arrives at the small Swiss village of Sils-
Maria. She is there to gather material for her PhD thesis about the life and philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche. It is exactly a hundred years since he had been to that very place, and
where he had been struck by the enigmatic idea of Eternal Return. There she encounters none
other than the philosopher himself. It becomes obvious that her interest in his philosophy is not
purely academic; she has personal reasons too. Like him, Magdalena had lost her father; more
distressingly still, her sister had taken her own life in an attack of severe depression. She
believes that her sister’s preoccupation with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was partly to
blame. Magdalena is pulled by two opposing forces: one towards the future and life, the other
towards the past and the dead.
The action of the play spans less than twenty-four hours, during which Magdalena acquires
new insights into the philosophy of Nietzsche and, more importantly, into her own unresolved
grief. The play culminates in the couple dancing to Chopin’s Walz A minor, Opus Posthumous.
Will waltzing with the philosopher be redemptive and allow her to bury the dead? Will it save
her from killing herself?

Dramatis Personae:
NARRATOR’s VOICE (male)
RECEPTIONIST (woman in her sixties)
MAGDALENA (woman in her mid-thirties, a researcher)
NIETZSCHE (as middle-aged man)
FRITZ (ten-year-old boy)

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