Polish Cultural Institute Presents A COUPLE OF POOR, POLISH-SPEAKING ROMANIANS

The Polish Cultural Institute, in partnership with East River Commedia, present the New York premiere of Dorota Maslowska's play, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians. The play opens Wednesday, February 4th prior to an official press opening on February 10 and runs through February 26th, 2011, 8:00 PM at Abrons Arts Center. Abrons Arts Center is located at 466 Grand Street, NYC, Tickets: $20. For tickets call 212.352.3101 or www.abronsartscenter.org.

Directed by Paul Bargetto and starring Troy Lavallee (Blighty) and Robin Singer (Gina), Maslowska's play is a grotesque travelogue, in which foul-mouthed Blighty (a TV soap opera actor) and glue-sniffing Gina (a pregnant single mother) pretend to be poor Romanians as they bully their way across the Polish countryside. They hijack a taxi, take a joy ride with a drunken middle-aged woman and finally take shelter at a crazy hermit's home.

"Maslowska comes from the bridge generation in Poland - a generation that experienced as children the fall of communism and the tidal wave of western consumer culture that swept in afterward - and a Catholic Church unchained," states Director Paul Bargetto. "In this play she has created a Bonnie and Clyde for our times, roaring down the highway, high on speed, inseparable, torn with desire and loathing for one another, on a journey of self revelation that is brutal, laugh out loud funny and unexpectedly mystical."

"Dorota Maslowska destroyed the Polish literary language and recreated it anew for her generation, so that no young writer today can write without referring to her," states Agata Grenda, Deputy Director of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. "Paul Bargetto showed such sensitivity to the humor of Mrozek's language in his award-winning co-production of Serenade and Philosopher Fox with the Polish Cultural Institute, that we knew he would be the ideal candidate to direct a production of Maslowska in the U.S., whose humor turns precisely on her innovative use of language."

Dorota Maslowska has earned numerous awards for her bestselling genre-bending novels Snow White and Russian Red and The Queen‘s Peacock, both translated into several languages. Her work has been compared to that of writers such as Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting), J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch). She shook the literary world by edging out Nobel Prize-winning poet, Wislawa Szymborska, to receive Poland's highest literary honor, the Nike Award, in 2006, at the age of 23. Since then, her plays have been shown at stages in London, Berlin, Prague, Moscow,
Chicago, and throughout Poland. A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians premiered in Warsaw in 2006, followed by an acclaimed showing at London's
Soho Theater known for presenting daring international drama. The play had its US premiere at the Trap Door Theater in Chicago in 2009. Chicago Tribune then wrote: "Gripping! Full-frontal Nihilism!"