Streets Paved with Pitfalls HUNTING COCKROACHES

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

She is an emigre actress renowned in Warsaw for roles in the classics. In New York City she shuffles around a decaying and almost bare tenement flat, hanging up tea bags to dry for reuse while intoning Lady Macbeth's hand- washing scene in an odd singsong with a thick Polish accent. No one will hire her, and even she can hear herself and understand why.

He is an exiled writer, and his plight is, if anything, worse: audiences in his new country know next to nothing of the life he used to write about, and he knows next to nothing of the life familiar to them. To him, America is the Lower East Side of Manhattan plus the abstract, rectilinear shapes of the states on the map he stares at hour after hour. The story that this married couple tells is comic but grim: for the sake of freedom they have given up money, status, craft and identity. They are not only strangers in a strange land, they are becoming strangers to themselves. The U.S. can be a promised land for those who have nothing. For an artist, the promise may be a mirage.

Playwright Janusz Glowacki, 48, understands these frustrations all too well. After his novel Give Us This Day, about the birth of Solidarity, was banned by the Polish censor in 1981, Glowacki arrived in the U.S. as a virtual unknown. Hunting Cockroaches, which opened off-Broadway last week, transmutes his struggles into vibrant farce devoid of self-pity. During an emblematic sleepless night, as nightmare figures ranging from an immigration officer to condescending liberals pop out from beneath their bed, the pragmatic couple never complain of life's unfairness. They accept having to prove themselves. They just wish it would not take so long.

Glowacki's text, translated by Jadwiga Kosicka, benefits from lively staging by Arthur Penn and sensitive performances. Ron Silver bearishly evokes the descent from self-doubt to despair. Dianne Wiest (an Oscar nominee for her role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters) bubbles with fantasies of redemption: she stuffs a pillow under her clothes and says she will have a child; she tells an enigmatic joke and vows to become a stand-up comic. Each gently deflects the other in a tender marriage, unharrowed by grief.

The title evokes in equal measure the mundane pests who scurry through the apartment and the character in Kafka's Metamorphosis who arises one morning to find himself no longer a salesman but a bug. For this couple, each dawn is a reawakening to humiliation, each day a struggle to believe they can make an art as universal as Kafka's. They speak of their homeland with attempted distaste: "In Eastern Europe, nobody has a sincere smile except drunks and informers." They echo Poland's subjugation: they yearn to be Russian refugees, who they believe are more in fashion, and wish they had Russian goods to sell. But in the most poignant scene they feel compelled to telephone someone, anyone, back home, just to ask how things are. After realizing that everyone they can think of has emigrated, gone to prison, committed suicide, become a collaborator or retreated into paranoid fear of the state police, the wife sadly dials the number for the correct time -- in Warsaw.