From Riches to Rags . . . and Back : Polish Playwright Makes a Serendipitous Trip to the U.S.A.

Janusz Glowacki sits in his cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and warns the visitor: “Watch out, if you relax too much you may find yourself on the floor, this sofa works like a slide.

“Apart from this, it’s a perfectly good sofa. I picked it myself from a garage pile in a very fashionable neighborhood--Madison and 76th Street, I think!”

Glowacki, whose play, “Hunting Cockroaches,” opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum, has known his visitor for 30 years. We met as freshmen at Warsaw University. He majored in Polish literature, I majored in journalism. (I eventually settled in the United States in 1983.)

“If someone had told us then,” he says, “that in 1987 you would be interviewing the aspiring playwright Glowacki in New York, we would have laughed our heads off.”

At 49, Glowacki is an aspiring playwright

--again. In Poland he had published 10 books. His plays and screenplays had enjoyed immense popularity. As a personality, he had been one of Warsaw’s major social attractions--”the ironical and witty playboy” Glowacki. He never had any financial problems.

But again--that was in Poland.

“Only recently, I stopped having this nightmare: I am back in Poland and everything is back to normal except I do not have an exit visa, which I need to get back to my home in New York. An archetypal refugee nightmare. Still, it’s better than waking up in Poland only to find that you are a Japanese spy.”

When Glowacki writes, producers listen. When Glowacki talks, you may want to listen.

“How did I find myself in America? Unintentionally. In December of 1981, I came to London for the opening of my play ‘Cinders’ at the Royal Court Theater. I had bought supplies of food for my family in Poland with my royalties and was about to go back when martial law was declared at home.

“ ‘Cinders’ was a great success. I calculated that by eating the food I had intended for Christmas in Poland, I should have enough money to last three weeks in England. Then I would turn to alcohol.

“But, quite unexpectedly, Bennington College invited me to lecture during the spring semester. I convinced the immigration officer at the American Embassy in London that the reason for my visit to the United States was not specifically to spread venereal disease or to assassinate the President, but to fulfill my dream of having a play on Broadway.

“After a semester at Bennington, I decided to settle in New York. So in the winter of 1982, dressed in my immigrant best, I stood solemnly in a long line for half-priced tickets to a Broadway play.

“It struck me as rather odd that I did not see the names of Great American Playwrights on the marquees, but I convinced myself that a generation of New Great American Playwrights had come along that I didn’t know about. The Americans surely knew what they were doing.

“Eventually, I met an off-Broadway producer. The first question he asked me was, ‘How many characters are there in your play?’ When I said 14, he asked that I reduce the number to seven, because there had never been a play off-Broadway with a cast larger than seven. I refused.

“The play was called ‘Fortinbras Gets Drunk.’ Later I rewrote it with seven characters, but it has never been staged. It seems that very few people know who Fortinbras is. Every producer eliminates him from ‘Hamlet,’ trying to get the number of characters down to seven.”

“Meanwhile, my wife and daughter joined me. Now I had to find a place to live and furnish it.

“That brought me back to Broadway. After finding a very good king-size mattress, a working black-and-white TV (which was subsequently stolen from our apartment) and a moderately worn Oriental rug at a garbage pile, we loaded them on a cart and pushed it through Midtown Manhattan towards our place.

“It was a hot, sticky day and on Broadway the mattress began to slip. So here I was, in the middle of Broadway, all sweaty and exhausted, trying to cope with junk I would never have looked at in Poland.

“On the other hand, four of my one-act plays, which in Poland were rejected by censors, had just been produced off-Broadway, and I made off with $250. Encouraged, I sent copies of ‘Cinders,’ together with the reviews from London, to 48 theaters.

“Finally Joseph Papp read the play and decided to produce it. ‘Cinders,’ which opened at the Public Theater in February 1984, got very good reviews. The run of the play was extended twice and I gave a few interviews for very sophisticated periodicals with very few readers.

“A few theaters in Europe bought rights, which gave me an incentive to work on ‘Hunting Cockroaches.’ By that time we moved to this apartment on the Lower East Side and invested in four sets of window bars and eight locks.

“All this is reflected in ‘Cockroaches.’ It was staged first in Woodstock, N.Y., and then Arthur Penn agreed to direct it. And it became a success.

“People laugh, probably because my play shows immigrants who did not come to this country to make money; who are neurotic; who are haunted by ghosts of political policemen from Poland, by American immigration officers who appear from under their bed.

“It is exactly the reverse of the generally accepted image: the immigrants who reach the American paradise and, after a more or less painful period of adjustment to superior American civilization, manage to live happily ever after.

“Surprise, surprise: My underdogs can afford self-irony, but not self-pity.

“I should not have said that my characters do not care about money. They care a lot, since they have known better days. They used to be a part of an intellectual elite. Here they suffer greatly, primarily because they lost their status.

“In ‘Cockroaches,’ the man was once a writer of some fame on the other side of the Elbe, and the woman was an actress of renown and sophistication. Why have they left the country in which they prospered?

“I’ll tell you a story. The first play I wrote in Poland had two acts. The first took place in a sleazy bar filled with alcoholics, the second in a train going nowhere. The censor ordered me to throw out the first part, to give the play more social value, and to find a destination for the train in the second act.

“At first I said no. The censor looked amused and told me to call him in case I changed my mind. After a meeting with my director I entered negotiations with the Office of Censorship. After half a year we reached an agreement almost honorable to me. The sleazy bar was out, but the train was still going nowhere.

“This is why I left the country, and this is why the characters of ‘Cockroaches’ left the country.”

“I have a friend who is an unsuccessful painter in New York. When asked why he does not return to Poland, he says: ‘Because my friends would laugh at me.’ Still, he is only half-serious. The fact is that he is quite happy with living in New York. First, because he loves ugliness. Second, because it makes him work hard.”

“I have never worked that hard in my life. But I am getting closer to being on Broadway, not with a mattress but with a play. ‘Cockroaches’ is being staged around the world, a movie option has been bought, I still am rewriting ‘Fortinbras Gets Drunk.’

“At the same time I am working on a screenplay about an American correspondent in Poland. Very funny. It will probably be the last thing I write about Poland. And I will definitely move to a place where I will not need sets of window bars and eight locks.”