Plucked From Potter's Field

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ANTIGONE IN NEW YORK

AUTHOR: JANUSZ GLOWACKI

WHERE: ARENA STAGE, WASHINGTON

THE BOTTOM LINE: A Polish emigre wittily blends a classic theme with contemporary insight into immigrants and the homeless.

Life in communist Eastern Europe may have been hypocritical at best and brutal at worst, but it made its contribution to art. The ritual and melodrama of public existence, the need to express defiance in code, shaped a generation of visually imaginative, verbally polemic and metaphorically minded playwrights and directors. Many of them have enriched the U.S. stage as visitors or immigrants. None is funnier or a shrewder observer of his adopted homeland than Janusz Glowacki, a Pole whose 1987 Hunting Cockroaches poignantly and hilariously evoked the dilemma of the emigre artist -- unable to interest audiences in stories about life back home and unable to trust his insights about the strange new world he inhabits now.

Glowacki proves just as witty, and far more acerbic, in a new play about two immigrants for whom the promised land has failed: a manic Polish thief (Richard Bauer) and a depressive Russian drunk (Ralph Cosham) who are among the homeless living in New York City's Tompkins Square Park. Set during an era of police raids against the squatters in 1989, Antigone in New York takes its title from the Greek myth of a woman who defied political authority to give a fallen relative proper burial.

The slender plot centers on the two men's attempts to retrieve a fallen comrade destined for potter's field so they can inter him behind the bench they call home. The Antigone figure is the dead man's lover, a deranged Puerto Rican (Sheila Tousey) who believes the shoulder pads of garments accumulate bad luck. Authority is personified by a fat, jolly black policeman (Jeffery Thompson) whose monologues gradually become more callous and sinister. The play owes at least as much to Beckett's Waiting for Godot as it does to Sophocles, and it can be thoroughly enjoyed without knowledge of either.

The Russian is the sharper and better educated of Glowacki's two tramps, but his learning has made him cynical and morose. Linking a favorite painting to memories of living next door to a KGB interrogation facility, he says, "My father thought that in the 16th century Bosch had predicted our apartment in Leningrad, because he used music to drown out the screaming of the condemned." The manic Pole gets just as many laughs with his inept lies, naked scheming and relentless self-pity. Recalling a newspaper story about a homeless woman who died with $25,000 on her person, he says, "Now there are crowds of people coming down here from upper Manhattan to roll us. Once I was rolled by a whole family."

Such social criticism might sound implausible in the mouths of the unwashed, but Glowacki and the actors are entirely convincing. The second half drags a bit but has one stunning moment of irony. As the Puerto Rican woman sits embracing the rescued corpse, she recalls a moment of long-ago gallantry from the dead man -- or someone she now believes was he -- and asks, "How could you not recognize the person you love?" The answer is, all too easily. As the tramps have realized moments before, at the end of their odyssey they have taken the wrong body. The burial, like so many political rituals, is a false and pointless gesture.