STAGE REVIEW : Bright Wordplay in Kafkaesque Comedy ‘Hunting Cockroaches’

Janusz Glowacki’s “Hunting Cockroaches” is a pun with reverberations, a clever sociopolitical play on words and ideas that goes on for almost two hours.

“Cockroaches,” now at the Way Off Broadway playhouse, is about a Polish dissident writer who lives with his wife in Manhattan’s lower Eastside. His current speciality is trying to teach Kafka to “kids who drive sports cars.” Jan and his wife, Anka, feel hopeless because of the impossibility in that, and they worry that their life has become its own creepy cliche of a Kafka tragedy.

While peering around their downscale apartment, Jan (Brian Bolis) dwells on Samsa, the wretch who was transformed into a cockroach in Kafka’s signature novel, “The Metamorphosis,” while Anka (Carole L. Cooney) frets over all the real cockroaches marauding through their kitchen.

The punny irony is pretty clear: In Poland, where he carried the cachet of a thinker, Jan could linger on such thoughts and enjoy their associations, even while the state police were knocking at his door. But in America, where few of the promises were realized, it’s all about practicalities and getting the job done while living in a hard environment.

This is a comedy, bright with wordplay, but it has its bleak challenge as well. Glowacki, a politically oriented Polish writer (he also wrote “Cinders”) who left that country during the post-Solidarity backlash, makes the pressures on Jan palpable--a new life has left him with writer’s block, insomnia and pushy hallucinations from the past. It’s laughable when characters emerge from under the bed to torment him and his wife, but it’s also unsettling in a, well, Kafkaesque way.

As for the Way Off Broadway cast, Bolis, with his stunned look and feverish reflections, comes the closest of any of director Tony Reverditto’s actors to eliciting a sense of surreal confusion that results from both his disappointment and terror with these new, unexpected surroundings. The others, at least at Thursday’s preview performance, make errors by trying to do too much; to make it all hilarious.

Much of the drama settles on Anka, a famous classical actress in Poland who is now unable to get even the smallest role in New York because of her thick accent. Cooney’s best moment comes at the very beginning as Anka paces the flat, reciting Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking soliloquy. It’s torturous and funny--when she asks the audience if her accent is really that bad, we feel for her, and laugh at the same time.

But Cooney gets carried away, making everything so big that we begin to lose compassion for their predicament. Most of those in minor roles (Zee, Brian McCoy, Paul Pierce, Robb Reesman and Victoria Penrose) make the same mistake. With this type of humanist satire, it’s best to hold something in reserve.

On the positive side, the set by Reverditto, Cooney and Del DePierro is appropriate, all darkness and disarray, and Steve Schmidt’s lighting helps orchestrate the mood. ‘HUNTING COCKROACHES’

A Way Off Broadway production of Janusz Glowacki’s play. Directed by Tony Reverditto. With Carole L. Cooney, Brian Bolis, Zee, Brian McCoy, Paul Pierce, Robb Reesman and Victoria Penrose. Set by Tony Reverditto, Carole L. Cooney and Del DePierro. Lighting by Steve Schmidt. Makeup by Paul Thompson. Plays Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. through July 7, with a matinee July 8 at 2 p.m. at 1058 E. 1st St., Santa Ana. Tickets: $12. Information: (714) 547-8997.