Existential Angst in Kana of Poland’s ‘Night’

Here’s a fun question for a Soviet bloc party-game: Who among the oppressors in the government wouldn’t you strangle? For one man contemplating this question in the course of a long, drunken, dark night of the soul, the answer is immediately clear: Andropov. He lowered the price of vodka.

This is one of the more coherent exchanges in “The Night,” an offering from Theatre Kana of Poland, a troupe with an avant-garde bent that won honors at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1994. Kana is making its American debut here, at the Odyssey Theatre in West Hollywood. “The Night,” which alternates with “Moscow-Petushki” (also based on the work of Russian writer Venedict Erofeyev ), is an alcohol-drenched series of encounters among five men on a train. This is the journey of writer as lost soul, a man just trying to get by in a Kafkaesque universe, with the help of a lot of vodka and some boisterous conversation.

In the hands of writer-director-costumer Zygmunt Duczynski, “The Night” is a potpourri of non sequiturs with a heavy overlay of existential angst. The world outside of the train is not evoked, and the philosophizing seems as isolated as the play’s five characters: Satan (Mariusz Blimel), the Ticket Inspector (Slawoj Golanski), the Jew (Janusz Janiszewski, who gets hounded by the Ticket Inspector), the Alchemist (Dariusz Mikula) and the Writer (Jacek Zawadzki). Their ostensibly brilliant ramblings produce quotable lines but not much more: “Everything suffers from postnatal depression,” “Woman will always be woman--the terror and wonder of the universe.” Stuff like that.

As the Writer, Zawadzki has a heavenly, resonant voice and a serene Everyman quality rather like Gunnar Bjornstrand, the great Ingmar Bergman actor. His presence helps center the play. The rest of the cast is big on making faces and their English is sometimes difficult to understand. The translator is Caryl Swift.

In lasting value, “The Night” adds up to about the same thing as an actual drunken night of philosophizing. The morning after, however, is painless.

* “The Night,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., English: Wednesdays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 5 p.m.; Jan. 19, 2 p.m. Polish: Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 19. $18.50-$22.50. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 1 hour.