THEATER REVIEW : ‘Emigrants’ an Existential ‘Odd Couple’

In Slawomir Mrozek’s “The Emigrants,” truth comes from simple things, such as a can of dog food.

The title characters in Mrozek’s spare, bitterly ironic one-act are two impoverished exiles from an unnamed European country.

The simple-minded laborer known as XX (Ryan Cutrona) is obsessed with the dream of returning to his native country a rich man. Yet his roommate, the coolly intellectual political refugee AA (Jeremy Lawrence) keeps dashing such illusions. As an oblivious XX prepares to devour dinner from a can, AA points out that the food was made for pets.

“I’m not a dog!” XX says, angrily shoving aside the can.

“No man is a dog,” observes AA, “or at least he shouldn’t be.”

Dehumanization is a central idea in “The Emigrants.” A kind of existential “The Odd Couple,” it’s a dark comedy about homesickness--not the superficial kind felt during a long vacation, but rather the chronic, despairing variety that robs expatriates of their identity and humanity.

Mrozek, who fled his native Poland after protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, must have known the feeling. His play evokes the anguished longing of refugees from the former Communist bloc countries.

But director Florinel Fatulescu’s handsome and powerfully acted production at Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood is deliberately indefinite about place and time, making the play’s themes resonate even in the post-Cold War age. Like the two hobos in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Mrozek’s protagonists are engaged in an absurd game of chess, with their deepest illusions at stake.

Set designer Bob Zentis has built the perfect space, a squalid basement apartment where heating and sewage pipes snake up and down the walls. In this echo chamber, a toilet flush roars and rattles as dripping faucets tap out an infernal symphony. In one of the evening’s most memorable speeches, AA imagines that he and his friend live as parasites in the innards of some Leviathan.

The performances succeed in humanizing what could otherwise be a somewhat cold and forbidding dialectic. Cutrona, playing what AA describes as “the ideal slave,” is clad in a moth-eaten tweed suit and a blinking, benumbed expression, his outward simplicity masking hardened desperation and greed. Lawrence, meanwhile, makes the ideal tortured intellectual, with his frizzy mane of hair, Woody Allen glasses and melodramatic outbursts.

Together these gifted actors remind one why some emigrants will never be immigrants.

* “The Emigrants,” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 25. $18. (213) 465-1010. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.