Bio

 
JANUSZ GLOWACKI playwright, novelist, screenwriter, short story writer and essayist, is the author of 8 plays, 10 books, 6 screenplays and 10 radio plays. Four of his movie scripts were produced in Poland, one directed by Oscar winning Andrzej Wajda. In 1999 his screenplay, HAIRDO, won the Tony Cox Screenwriting Award in the Nantucket Film Festival Screenplay Competition.

In December of 1981, Glowacki, attended the opening of his play CINDERS at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The Guardian called the play: "The best fringe production ...of the year." The London Times: "one of the finest pieces of ensemble playing in London this year." When martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981, he decided not to return to his country. He moved to New York in 1982, where he currently lives with his family. In1984, CINDERS was produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, starring Christopher Walken and directed by John Madden. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times: "Extremely clever and provocative writing...Mr. Glowacki has a keen ability to mine the dark absurd humor in the language of terror and makes elegant Kafkaesque comedy out of his nation's ongoing nightmare of repression." John Simon wrote in New York Magazine: "CINDERS is a cat and mouse game. As comic as it is scary." The run of the play was extended twice. CINDERS was subsequently produced in Belgrade, Frankfurt, Seoul, in Buenos Aires where it received the Moliere Award for the best production of ‘86, and in the National Theatre in Taipei, as well as in more than twenty theatres across the U.S. In 1988 CINDERS was produced in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a number of other cities in the former Soviet Union.

The tragi-comedy, FORTINBRAS GETS DRUNK, a macabre retelling of HAMLET from the Norwegian point of view, was the first play written by JANUSZ GLOWACKI in the USA The play received several stage readings -- at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Public Theatre and Roundabout Theatre, with the participation of Derek Jacoby, F. Murray Abraham, Raul Julia, Jeffrey DeMunn, and Philip Bosco, among others. The play was produced in Moscow, Cracow, Sarayevo, London, and Los Angeles.

GLOWACKI'S HUNTING COCKROACHES, was originally produced at the River Arts Repertory Company in Woodstock N.Y., then at the Manhattan Theatre Club, (starring Dianne Wiest and Ron Silver, directed by Arthur Penn), the Mark Taper Forum, (Swoosie Kurtz, Malcolm McDowell), Alley Theatre in Houston, Wisdom Bridge Theatre, Chicago, Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and more than 40 other professional theatres in the US. The play was also produced in Sydney, Toronto, Marseilles, Lyon, Geneva, and Brussels (starring Jean Louis Trintignant). HUNTING COCKROACHES was cited by the American Theatre Critics Association as an Outstanding New Play in 1986. It received the Joseph Kesselring Award (1987) and the Hollywood Drama League Critics Award in 1987. Time Magazine as well as several other magazines named the play HUNTING COCKROACHES as one of the ten best plays of the year. Two monologues of the play were included in the anthology (SOLO-THE BEST MONOLOGUES OF THE 1980’s). The whole play is included in a collection of Janusz Glowacki's plays, published in May, 1990 by Northwestern University Press.

Glowacki’s play ANTIGONE IN NEW YORK, optioned by Arena Stage, was produced in Washington DC. In 1993 Time Magazine called it one of the best 10 plays of the year. The play was produced in Prague, St. Petersburg , Moscow, Bonn, Yale Repertory, Atlanta, New York (Vineyard Theatre), Mexico City, Croatia, Lithuania, Paris (where it received Le Balladine Award for the best play of 1997 in theatres of up to 250 seats) and in 9 theatres in Poland. The play has been translated into 20 languages.

Glowacki’s most recent play, THE FOURTH SISTER had its world premiere in January of 2000, in Warsaw, Poland. It was produced in several theatres in Poland, in Germany, Slovenia and it won the grand prize in the 2001 International Theatre Festival in Dubrovnik.

In August 1980, during the strike in the Gdansk shipyard, which resulted in the birth of Solidarity, Glowacki spent time with the striking workers. He wrote a novel GIVE US THIS DAY, about the experience. The novel was stopped by censors and therefore published underground in 1981. Later the book was published in France, England, West Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Greece. In 1985 GIVE US THIS DAY was published by St. Martin’s Mark in the US.