The 2023 history of Modjeska Art & Culture Club, Celebrating Modjeska in California: History of Helena Modjeska Art & Culture Club (2023), featured a chapter dedicated to the biography of Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetynski (1910-1989). Founder and Honorary President of the Modjeska Art & Culture Club. fragments of paper, "Polish Émigrés in California: Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński's Modjeska Players and the Helena Modjeska Art & Culture Club," presented at the 6th World Congress of Polish Studies organized by PIASA in Warsaw, Poland June 2024.
Born on 22 October 1910, in the Niebajki family estate in the Grodno district near Wilno (now Vilnius in Lithuania, then part of Russian Empire), Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński was raised in Poland; he was, among others, a graduate of the Drama Academy of Wilno and student at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. Not all information about Ossetyński’s early years is confirmed. Some biographers claim that he was a graduate of the National Academy of Theater in Warsaw. His typed-in “Vitae” from about 1980, mentions studies in literature at the Sorbonne and at the Dullin Experimental School of Drama, both of which are located in Paris. According to his biography published in the Almanac 1988-1989, in the years 1936-1937 Dudarew was an actor at the Municipal Theater in Toruń. As “Leonid Dudarew”, he appeared in a variety of roles, as romantic lead, ruler, or villain.
The outbreak of WWII found him in Paris so he joined the Polish Army in France, but was soon arrested and placed in POW camp in Morocco. In 1943 thanks to efforts of friends, he was able to leave for America. Upon arriving in the U.S. he changed his name from Leonid Dudarew to Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetynski. After arriving in New York, Ossetyński joined a group of Polish actors in exile, cinema, and theater stars of the Second Polish Republic, who established the Polish Theater of Artists on 22 November 1942. He was a managing director there, appeared in several plays and directed as well. Soon he joined the American Army, working as a translator. He also wrote various short stories, and newspaper features for Polish American press.
In 1946, the actor-journalist married Elizabeth Huguley (1920-2002) who was his witness at the U.S. citizenship ceremony; they had one daughter together, Valerie Dudarew-Ossetyńska Hunken. To support his family, Ossetyński established a restaurant called Wilno in Agoura, Los Angeles County, t hat served as a meeting point for actors and Polish émigrés, and had a small performance stage. The Wilno Restaurant was frequented by the creative elite of Polonia, including artist Stanisław Szukalski (1893-1987), Maria Werten (1888-1949), actor-director Romuald Gantkowski, actress Pola Negri (1897-1987), and dancer Loda Halama (1911-1996).
In 1947, Ossetyński started working for the Actors Studio of the famous acting teacher, Michael Chekhov (Mikhail Aleksandrovich; 1891–1955), a nephew of the Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov. This creative relationship continued until Chekhov’s death in 1955 and provided the Polish émigré with experience and relationships to open his own Ossetynski Actors Laboratory.
Ossetyński’s theatrical passion and reverence for the great star of Polish and American stages was apparent already when he chose Modjeska as the patron of his first Californian theater troupe. The actor founded his own theater group the Modjeska Players / Teatr im. Heleny Modrzejewskiej in 1954, with a Polish actress Lidia Próchnicka (1920-1994), whom he recruited from South America; she came to California from Chile upon his invitation and with his support. They staged plays in English and Polish and toured the U.S. and Canada for more than three years, giving several hundreds of performances with a program entitled From Fredro to the Uprising. It was a theatrical evening consisting of poems and three one-act plays – Fraszkopis, Visits at Dusk, The Candle Went Out – and Zbigniew Jasiński’s poem “Song of the Uprising.”
The logo for the Modjeska Players was designed by Stanisław Szukalski who also made plans for the monument to Helena Modjeska, which Ossetyński proposed to erect in Hollywood; the actor was an active member of the Helena Modjeska Commemoration Committee of 1949, later becoming the initiator and Executive Secretary of its successor, the Helena Modjeska Memorial Committee established in 1954. This project did not come to fruition.
The departure of Próchnicka for New York in 1957 put an end to the Modjeska Players’ tours but not to their collaboration, and certainly not to Lidia’s stage and film career. In New York, Próchnicka became the Polish announcer for the Voice of America where she worked for 18 years; she also played many comic roles on off-Broadway stages and appeared in numerous films and TV series. Ossetyński traveled between California and the East Coast to direct several Polish plays in English translations on the off-Broadway scene. Throughout this period, he conducted extensive correspondence with the luminaries of Polish culture, such as playwright Sławomir Mrożek (1930-2013), whose play Policjanci (The Police) Ossetyński translated in 1960 and directed in 1961.
About 10 years after his marriage to Elizabeth Hughley, Ossetynski divorced. He later married again in late 1960s to Teresa Domanska who followed him to California from Poland. After returning from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, Ossetyński developed a unique teaching method in his own acting studio, Ossetynski Actors Laboratory, inspired in its name and a syncretic approach to acting by the experimental work of legendary theater director Jerzy Grotowski. He also drew from the method of Michael Chekhov, based on Stanislavsky’s approach. In 1966, the émigré actor traveled to Poland for the first time after WWII; during this visit he attended many theatrical performances, met with directors and actors, and performed for the Polish Radio Theater. In all, he Visited the Polish People’s Republic three times: in 1966, 1977, and 1986 – the latter two times with the Ossetynski Actors Lab and his students. During these travels, with great enthusiasm he attended theater plays, met with actors and directors, the students gave workshops for host theaters such as Gardzienice, or Teatr Kto, and the director gave interviews for the press and television programs while gathering information about fascinating avant-garde experiments in Polish theater.
In order to promote Polish theater and culture in California, Ossetynski needed a group of like-minded people who would share his passion for the arts. The idea of creating the Modjeska Club emerged in 1971 and the actor gave credit in his farewell speech as the Club’s first president in 1978 to four people: himself, composers Stefan Pasternacki and Waclaw Gazinski as well as Eugenia Domachowska. For the first eight years of activity in the Modjeska Club, 1971-1978, Dudarew-Ossetyński was its President and the driving force behind its projects: he invited outstanding personalities to cooperate on the Board, while planning and implementing its programs. Artistic Advisory Board included Pasternacki, Szukalski, and Stefan Wenta. Notable ents featured Sławomir Mrożek’s play Emigranci (The Émigrés) that was given its unofficial world premiere in 1973 in the Reading Theater of the Modjeska Club. In a year, this play took worldwide theater stages by storm; but its humble beginnings are inseparably connected to the Modjeska Club.
Similarly, the invitation of director Jerzy Grotowski to the U.S., his subsequent explorations of American theater, and experiments involving actors and the audience as equally significant participants in the theatrical ritual and psychological experiment, may also be credited to Ossetyński. In 1973, Grotowski conducted an eight-hour workshop with Modjeska Club members and Ossetynski's students. In 1975, a massive group of nearly 240 musicians performed the monumental Requiem by Roman Maciejewski at the Los Angeles Music Center, to great critical acclaim; Dudarew-Ossetynski spent a decade, since 1965 as leader of a committee that organized this performance in collaboration with the Master Chorale, Roger Wagner, and the Modjeska Club. Artur Rubinstein was the honorary chairman of this organization.
In 1977, the OAL took its students with Stefanie Powers on a two-month tour of Poland, with a repertoire of acting etudes. He gave 15 lectures in various Polish cities, including: Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Poznań, Ełk, Łomża, Szczecin, Wrocław, and Zielona Góra. During this trip, Ossetyński and his students spent time with Grotowski at his Teatr Laboratorium reinforcing earlier connection of 1973. The group’s founder and leader was interviewed for Przekrój, Ekran, Kultura and Poland magazines; he also appeared in a Polish TV program, Pegaz (Pegasus). The actor-director was far more interested in promoting and teaching theater than in organizing small cultural events in the Modjeska Club.
On 17 November 1978 Ossetyński resigned from the Club’s presidency. On this occasion, he gave a speech, full of interesting remarks about the purpose and mission of the Club, as well as descriptions of its past projects and accomplishments. He did not hide his embittered feelings due to the lack of interest by the Club members in volunteer work for the promotion of Polish culture. After the first President’s resignation, Dr. Andrzej Mikulski took over the helm of the organization but died within a month. Then, a Board member Jerzy Gąssowski was elected President in December 1978; he served for four successive one-year terms until 1983. During that time, the Club’s programs were greatly diminished in scope and number; its membership plummeted; and a mood of crisis permeated its activities. The Board (or its reminder, after a spate of resignations), continued to work closely not with the Modjeska Club’s Founder and first President, but with his former wife, Teresa Domańska-Ossetyński; their divorce took place in 1981. Meanwhile, Ossetyński temporarily retained the title of Honorary President, but on 13 November 1981 by the decision of the Board, he was formally removed from the Club’s membership, including the withdrawal of his honorary title. Alas, upon a review of subsequent Modjeska Club publications, there is indication that the removing of its founder and first President from membership and any association with the Modjeska Club was not enough to satisfy his detractors. They continued to attack his reputation, diminish and distort his contributions, and pretend that none of what he did to promote Polish culture in California ever mattered.
~ By Maja Trochimczyk, based on fragments of paper, "Polish Émigrés in California: Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński's Modjeska Players and the Helena Modjeska Art & Culture Club," presented at the 6th World Congress of Polish Studies organized by PIASA in Warsaw, Poland June 2024. The paper is an updated version of a biography of Dudarew-Ossetynski included in Celebrating Modjeska in California: History of Helena Modjeska Art & Culture Club (2023), written after extensive archival research and with tremendous support and encouragement of his daughter, Valerie Dudarew-Ossetynska Hunken. Photos are from her archives, some also preserved at the Polish Museum of America, where LDO Papers are now located.
