Shades of Absurdity

...The costumes are better forgotten altogether...

...Those words, though, did not appear on a replacement sheet inserted in the Playbill...

...Paradoxically, Hunting Cockroaches is so good that it belies its own premise...

...The Krupinskis kill them (well, a few) with a slipper...

...Artistic director Gregory Mosher, in a great display of catholic taste, has opened his solemn hall to Nigerian professor and playwright Wole Solinka, winner of last year's Nobel prize for literature...

...When the King's funeral procession appears in front of the gates of the colonial residence, however, the Elesin Oba foils this plan by strangling himself with his own chains...

...It is evident from the nightmarish quality of Jan and Anka's nocturnal imaginings, however, that another sort of cockroach has played a role in their lives, a human sort...

...Stardust offers enough songs to supply many pleasant evenings in a cabaret setting, where you sit at a table and consume the appropriate drinks...

...It is typical of the playwright's gentle humor that he also has the otherwise execrable rich couple bring along one truly thoughtful gift for the needy émigrés: a pair of blankets...

...Heidi Landesman's set and Richard Nelson's lighting are just what they should be...

...The six performers (three men, three women) all have some talent, and in the proper cabaret environment would certainly be appreciated...

...It is hard to to imagine a more perfect absurdist transformation of a famous Shakespearean character...

...Hunting Cockroaches is something very special...

...The British district officer, bound by an"alien culture," is incapableof grasping the profundity of the ritual that symbolizes, in Solinka's words, "the universe of the Yoruba mind...

...But sitting in a theater for two hours while the performers sing their way through some 30-40 songs without a semblance of a story line is boring...

...Solinka states that his play is based on events surrounding a specific observance of the funerary custom in 1946, and he claims that a factual account of them still exists in the archives of the British Colonial Administration...

...Their complaint-filled yet relentlessly amusing dialogue is punctuated by a series of dream episodes that underscore the absurdity of the intercultural limbo they are caught in...

...Taking place in/around/under a large bed that dominates Jan and Anka's Lower East Side tenement flat, the play deals with the extraordinary difficulties faced by expatriate writers and stage artists who have to adjust to a new linguistic and cultural milieu...

...These ugly creatures differ from the insect variety in a crucial respect: They cannot be hunted down because they do the hunting...

...The appeal of the songs in Stardust owes less to the rather conventional lyrics than to the music of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and others...

...The two, dressed to the teeth, emerge from under the bed —as do all the hallucinatory characters —bearing a gift-wrapped miniature of the Statue of Liberty, which Jan and Anka add to the shelf-full they already possess...

...Having succeeded in surviving the procrastinations of the American immigration bureaucracy, Glowacki was able to bring his wife and little daughter to this country...

...Yet it has elements of both...

...Indeed, it would be surprising if its present limited engagement did not result in a long-run on Broadway...

...And should an American "blurb-writer" who "unblushingly" saw in another of his works "the clash between old values and new ways, between Western methods and African traditions" really be convicted of "illiteracy...

...One of the best features a radical chic couple from Park Avenue, played with a consummate sense of farce by Paul Sparer and Joan Copeland...

...The acting, I repeat, is superb...

...On Stage SHADES OF ABSURDITY BY LEO SAUVAGE JANUSZ Glowacki is not a Polish refugee, but his plays and books—including one about the Solidarity movement—have long been the target of censors in his native land...

...As for the cockroaches of the title, the flat has plenty of them...

...Those who try to locate some sense in what is enacted and recited and shouted during Death are dismissed by Solinka with contemptuous indignation...

...at the Biltmore Theater, bears the subtitle "The Mitchell Parish Musical...

...A few do fit this description...

...If I have correctly elicited the meaning of his injunction, I must confess that my critical song of lamentation is not for the dead but for the play...

...It was also dictated that the king's closest minister and companion, who bore the honorary title Elesin Oba ("Horseman of the King"), be killed—or perhaps commit suicide, it's not that easy to tell...

...Does the mere fact of speaking about a "clash of cultures" betray a "perverse mentality," as he asserts in his note...

...So many superlatives in one paragraph may seem excessive, but they are all merited...

...In fact, Hunting Cockroaches is pretty obviously autobiographical—although Glowacki's wife actually was a journalist in Warsaw and not a Shakespearean actress, like Jan Krupinski's stage wife Anka...

...It cannot be described as a dramatic outcry against intellectual repression in Eastern Europe, nor is it a sharply pointed satire on the esthetic shortcomings of the business-oriented West...

...Nevertheless, I shall daringly try to explain what little I could understand of the incident the famous writer says he "employed creatively...

...Dianne Wiest performs the part magnificently, setting the tone for the whole evening with her entrance: an irresistible Polish-accented version of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking soliloquy...

...So he absents himself from a costume ball—for which he and his wife have frivolously arrayed themselves in Yoruba holy dress emblematic of death—and tries to have the Elesin Oba arrested in order to prevent his murder /suicide...

...The best description, "a cavalcade of songs,' appeared in a press release, which went on to place them among "the country's biggest Tin Pan Alley hit songs...

...His decision to become an émigré was made while doingsomeshoppingforhis return to Warsaw—when he heard that General Wojciech Jaruzelski had placed Poland under martial law...

...Nor, for that matter, is it a theatrical piece of any kind...

...In Oy?, the ancient Yoruba kingdom in southwestern Nigeria, custom required that the king's funeral be held 30 days after his death...

...The kind of summary I have just given is violently condemned by Solinka in a signed note distributed with the Playbill...

...Insomnia is the leitmotif of Hunting Cockroaches, and it also furnishes the play's wittily inventive form...

...Parish was their collaborator, but they didn't wait to get his words before starting their melodies—he merely added rhyming Unes...

...He doesn't mention whether the Yoruba practices continued after Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960...

...One hopes he will do better in the future...

...The family now lives in Manhattan where his locally written Hunting Cockroaches is being performed before full houses at the City Center by the Manhattan Theater Club...

...Happily, Stardust makes use of a crack eight-man one-woman (at the harp) band led by James Raitt...

...As for the scenery by David Jenkins and the lighting by Ken Billington, I remember only a neon sign saying TIN PAN ALLEY...

...Jan Krupinski, beautifully realized by Ron Silver, is like the playwright a Polish émigré writer living in New York...

...Those who like them funny would favor André De Shields, while those who like them cute would go for Maureen Brennan...

...This could be plain honesty...

...ForaBroadway show, it's both too little and too much...

...But in fairness I should also say that this Nobel laureate has done better in the past...

...The district officer, though present, is too slow in intervening—perhaps because he has been warned that interference with the sacred customs will provoke a popular riot and spoil the royal arrival...

...Nor does he consider it expedient for the Yoruba's "human vehicle"—the Elesin Oba—to undergo his "largely metaphysical" transformation on the eve of a visit by a member of the royal family...

...The only theatrical merit I am willing to concede to Solinka's Death and the King's Horseman is that it brings employment, if only for a limited time, to a significant number of black performers...

...Janusz Glowacki has, in creating the play, left no doubt that an émigré writer can indeed break the barrier between cultures—and even dance on top of it...

...It was supposedly "conceived and directed" by Albert Harris, but I could not detect the presence of any direction, and the conception seems to have been simply a matter of picking the songs...

...In the meantime he might try to show a bit more understanding toward the benighted...

...On burial day his preferred dog was to be killed and the heart of his favorite horse removed— presumably to be interred with him...

...STARDUST...

...Glowacki's text is well-served both by Jadwiga Kosicka's fluent translation and by Arthur Penn's masterly direction...

...It helps to pass the time...

...It is true that Mitchell Parish wrote the evening's lyrics—including those for the 1929 Hoagy Carmichael song entitled "Star Dust"— but the result is not a musical...

...A markedly less good humored handling of the culture-gulf theme is being offered at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater...

...As he tells us in a recent article, his reason for leaving Poland in December 1981 was to attend the opening at the Royal Court Theatre in London of his play Cinders (which was produced two seasons ago at New York's Public Theater...

...The only honorable task for a critic, he insists, is "eliciting the play's threnodic essence...

...I should add that Solinka's direction of Death and the King's Horseman is as bad as his writing...

...Jan and Anka, assailed by memories of a Polish past and worries about an American present and future, spend a sleepless night together...

...A particularly nice touch—and a subtle contribution to the play's rhythm —is a lamp over the bed that Anka and Jan periodically switch on and off by means of a long string...

...If that is so, then after enduring Death and the King's Horseman 1 can only plead nolo contendere...