Bruising Productions : All-U-Can-Eat Players claim the same desire as The Actors’ Gang to bring classics of radical theater directly to the audiences

They’re young, not too far out of their college years when the university drama department didn’t always quite know what to make of them, and now, deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast.

At day, they go on auditions. At night, they collect at a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Their first production was a rude blowtorch in the face of showcase theater--one of the plays in Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu” trilogy, which upended conventional European theater at the turn of the century. No one member speaks for their group, and all of them are pretty sure that at least one of them is going to get some bruises, scratches--perhaps some broken bones--during performances. Maybe every performance; they’re that physical.

No, this isn’t 11 years ago, when The Actors’ Gang’s 1982 staging of “Ubu Roi” was about the loudest, brashest thing that ever shook the walls of the now-extinct Pilot Theatre. This is right now: The 1993 emergence of the All-U-Can-Eat Players is a case, in Yogi Berra’s phrase, of deja vu all over again.

As with the Gang, so with the Players is the same vitality, the same esprit de corps, the same desire to bring the classics of radical theatrical expression directly to an audience.

But the All-U-Can-Eaters aren’t out to be “the other Gang,” and feel that their follow-up to their spring production of Jarry’s “Ubu in Chains”--the L.A. premiere of Slawomir Mrozek’s “The Prophets,” now playing at the World Theatre--will prove it.

As members Jonathan Emery, Kathryn Kelly, Tuc Watkins, Vincent Ventresca and Ben Livingston--Indiana University graduates all--sit in the World’s intimate, comfortable space and talk about the company’s unlikely coming-and-staying-together, they switch from wisecracking to reflections about doing plays virtually no one else in town seems to want to touch.

“It was a miracle that we didn’t crash into each other every night of ‘Ubu’,” says Kelly, who played Ma Ubu.

Ventresca barges in: “This show will be an even bigger miracle.”

One look backstage reveals why: There practically is no backstage, merely a short ledge off the stage and a tiny pair of steps that looks designed to twist ankles. The cramped changing area looks like an afterthought, and for “The Prophets,” director Emery has added a balcony.

“We’re moving the stage forward a little bit,” Emery explains, “but there’s still no room.”

And yet, in a place that would be claustrophobic for most people, the group creates dazzling stage pictures, characters flying in and out of openings like pinballs, and always a combination of words, music and action that keeps one looking and listening in at least three directions at once.

Lovell Estell III in the L.A. Weekly praised the bold choice of “Ubu in Chains”: “This classic piece remains amusing, and director Emery has done a splendid job, especially with the live band, which provides some right-on sound effects.”

It might be fair to ask how a bunch of kids got from Indiana to absurdist productions on Theatre Row Hollywood. The answer, it seems, is one word: Frustration.

“The amount of experimental theater at Indiana was . . .,” Kelly pauses, looking at her colleagues, “well, very limited.”

Watkins adds that they “had been answering to university bigwigs for four years,” so, in the last semester before their 1989 graduation, they decided to do something for themselves. Emery couldn’t persuade the school to produce a production of “Ubu Roi,” so he approached the Bloomington (Ind.) Playwrights Project, and took the show off campus.

It was there, they all say, that a kind of bonding happened--along with the group name. “Vince,” Emery says of actor Ventresca, “couldn’t keep a straight face during one scene, so I used my directorial wiles and promised to take him to a local place, the Ponderosa All-U-Can-Eat restaurant.” Frustration, though, soon returned. The I.U. grads dispersed, and Ventresca tried to arrange for a theater space in a San Francisco Bay-area aerobics center, but “a lack of interest” from local actors, and the group’s diaspora scuttled the project.

But Los Angeles and the film and TV industry served as a magnet for group members. One by one they arrived, goaded by Watkins, who told them that they could actually make money acting.

Luck--and design--has helped as well. Watkins was performing in Howard Korder’s “Boys’ Life” at the Hudson Theatre, and producer Milton Justice liked it enough to move it to the neighboring World, which he operates. Watkins told Justice of the All-U-Can-Eaters and their search for a space, and “made us a perfect offer.”

The search for plays is another matter. “Ubu in Chains,” they agree, was a natural choice to follow from their “Ubu Roi” in Indiana. But what to do next?

Livingston runs through the plays--all rarely seen, all stylish political comedies--they explored in group reading sessions: “Let’s see . . . there was Genet’s ‘The Balcony,’ Dario Fo stuff, Eastern European pieces, absurd plays.”

“I hate the word absurd ,” Watkins cuts in. “It kind of suggests theater of the non-understandable. It’s really non-realism that we’re looking for.”

“ ‘The Prophets’ seemed to stem from ‘Ubu,’ in that Jarry and Mrozek share the view that humankind is always trying to limit its options,” Emery says. In Mrozek’s mythical vision (which the Polish playwright, best known for “Tango,” wrote in 1972), a city ruled by a regent is being terrorized by a mob. They’re presented with not one, but two prophets, whose insights may or may not bring peace. “We’re depicting the prophets as religious,” says the director, “though in Poland under Communism, Mrozek didn’t make it so explicit. We’re keeping to his intent that, while this is a comedy, it’s allegorical, not satirical.”

“The Prophets” runs at the World Theatre, 6543 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, on Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., until Sept. 4. Tickets: $12. Information: (213) 883-1565.