Enjoying and Sharing Her 2 Worlds

Joanna Klass’ first trip from her native Poland to the United States was a lot like the avant-garde theater she’s loves: You expect one thing but encounter something entirely different.

“I was waiting for skyscrapers and gangsters shooting,” Klass said of her visit when she was 21, “and all I saw was endless cornfields and a low-hung moon. It was very quiet. Just crickets.”

That’s because she wound up in Kansas, visiting friends, rather than in New York or Hollywood. But she wasn’t disappointed.

“I loved it,” said Klass, 42. “It was like an American play. It’s always interesting to me to learn something new.”

Her interest American culture propelled her to choose Kurt Vonnegut as the subject of her master’s thesis in American literature at the University of Wroclaw.

Since relocating permanently to the U.S. in 1984, she’s become a producer, freelance writer, artist and the owner of her own Costa Mesa housecleaning business, House of Klass. It enables her to do “the fun things,” she said, “my art and bringing groups like Theater Kana over here.”

Klass grew up in the culturally rich city of Wroclaw, also the home of influential playwright and director Jerzy Grotowski who, coincidentally, spent time in Orange County in the 1980s teaching drama at UC Irvine.

It was a high-school excursion to see a production of one of Grotowski’s works that sparked Klass’ interest in the avant-garde.

“I just fell in love with that type of theater,” said Klass, who went on to direct and produce plays at the University of Wroclaw and the Festival of the Open Theater in Wroclaw.

This is the first time Klass, a divorced mother of two teenage boys, has brought a group from Poland, having sponsored a 1978 tour of Poland for the Dance Mime Company of Rebecca Feinstein from New York, a one-woman show.

Through her production company, Arden 2, named after the estate of Orange County’s favorite Polish emigre, actress Madame Helena Modjeska, Klass has bankrolled most of the production, paying the troupe’s living expenses and letting director Zygmunt Duczynski and a friend stay in her small apartment.

She took out a $10,000 loan to help pay the $15,000 cost of the show’s production, salaries and publicity management.

“I have no clue if I’ll get [any of that] back,” Klass said. “I apply for grants and got $1,000 from the Polish consulate to help pay for one of the $1,500 ads.

“I’ve wanted to do something for the community ever since I got here,” she said, citing Modjeska as her inspiration.

“This country,” she said, “has taught me that the sky’s the limit.”