Where reality, dreams clash

The writer and artist Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew who transmogrified everyday village life into something rich and strange, may not be well known outside of Europe. But his devotees in the U.S. include author John Updike, composer John Zorn and REDCAT, now presenting “The Last Escape,” Wroclawski Teatr Lalek’s (Wroclaw Puppet Theater) stage adaptation of one of Schulz’s short stories.

Clearly influenced by Franz Kafka -- the multilingual Schulz (1892-1942) apparently translated “The Trial” into Polish -- he also shared something of the spirit of Lewis Carroll. “Poetry happens when short circuits of sense occur,” Schulz once argued, and like a Mad Hatter of Mitteleuropa, he invented such illogical delights as rooms lined with snores, fathers who turned into wallpaper, and time so revisited that it could be sold as secondhand.

Schulz’s somersaults in prose have attracted intriguing interpreters, including the acclaimed Theatre du Complicite and the filmmaking Quay Brothers; both took a stab at the Polish writer’s surreal novel-memoir, “The Street of Crocodiles.” So too, Wroclaw Puppet Theater’s “The Last Escape” hunts for the fantastical lurking within the quotidian. The company uses live action, puppetry and Weill-esque cabaret laments -- sung with just the right degree of weltschmerz by Jolanta Goralczyk -- to sketch the hide-and-seek of memory and fantasy at play in Schulz’s story (an English translation of brief exchanges of dialogue is projected above the playing space).

With a few simple props, sheer curtains and minimal lighting, director-designer Aleksander Maksymiak (who also wrote the script) creates a minimalist dreamscape from the memories of Joseph (Krzysztof Grebski), an old-age pensioner holed up in a tiny room.

Fleeting images appear out of the darkness: three men with miniature school desks hung awkwardly around their necks, accompanied by a recorded chorus of Polish children singing “Deutschland uber alles”; a flock of open books, suspended in the air, pages fluttering like pale birds; a puppet of a young boy, slowly turning through space as Goralczyk sings a lullaby. Such moments begin to conjure Schulz’s world of impossible physics, but they provide only brief, unsatisfying glimpses of this visionary’s alternate universe.

Admittedly, Schulz claimed not to be interested in “long-winded creations, with long-term beings,” but in the quest to translate the author’s mercurial prose style to the stage, this ensemble hasn’t constructed a self-sustaining theatrical work that can hold an audience unfamiliar with Schulz’s writings.

In his new memoir, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” Daniel Mendelsohn seeks to uncover the fate of his great-uncle’s family, inhabitants of a small Polish town whose Jewish population was killed by Nazis and their collaborators. Schulz, languishing in another Polish ghetto, suffered essentially the same grim demise: He was shot in a dispute between two SS officers. By the end of his travels, Mendelsohn came to see Europe as a vast cemetery.

In “The Last Escape,” Schulz calls out from the oblivion of history, offering fragments he shored against his, and a whole people’s, ruin. Wroclaw Puppet Theater almost brings him back to life, but the artist remains in the shadowlands.

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‘The Last Escape’

Where: REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday

Price: $24

Contact: (213) 237-2800

Running time: 55 minutes