You can go home again, after all. But why would you?

“Home” happens to be modern-day Tel Aviv in Hanoch Levin’s 1975 play “Krum.” But notwithstanding Pawel Lozinski’s you-are-there video footage, the alternately eye-popping and enervating staging by the Polish avant-garde theater company TR Warszawa makes it clear that this could be any working-class hotbed of tedium. It’s the sort of town where “Disappointed already?” qualifies as an acceptable pickup line and weddings grind to a halt before anybody gets to eat. One gets the impression that the handful who do leave it tend not to return.

And yet the title character (played commandingly by Jacek Poniedzialek) has come back. He is a prodigal son of sorts, although he doesn’t seem to have done anything too bad in the past, doesn’t seem particularly reformed now, and receives a grim-looking bowl of food upon his return in lieu of a fatted calf. And while the people he encounters aren’t sorry to see Krum return, they don’t seem particularly excited either. They include his disapproving mother (Malgorzata Rozniatowska); Dupa (Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik), a hotsy-totsy ex-girlfriend determined to marry someone, anyone; and Tugati (Redbad Klijnstra), a stringy-haired sad sack in a gut-baring mesh sweater. Poor Tugati, whose primary activity is to “eat and breathe with supreme effort,” has become so paralyzed over whether to exercise in the morning or at night that his only solution is to not exercise.

These and a handful of other characters, notably a déclassé wealthy married couple, embark on a thunderously allegorical litany of day-in-the-life-such-as-it-is activities, guided by the boldly expressionistic director Krzysztof Warlikowski. People leave weddings still hungry. Lethargic young men succumb to vaguely defined ailments. Temptresses dangle the promise of escape to Los Angeles. Interlopers badger Krum’s mother about his emotional well-being. Through it all, a dissolute older man staggers around as a harbinger of imminent oblivion.

The play’s mixed lineage — Israeli playwright, Polish theatre company — manifests itself in any number of ways. Malgorzata Szczesniak’s spartan setting, with its mismatched seats and dingy walls, has a vaguely Eastern European vibe, but it could come from any down-on-its-heels institution. Other references are more specific: Mr. Warlikowski prefaces one “festive” event with desultory video footage of a 2005 bar mitzvah and follows a second, even bleaker ceremony by having the pathetic groom (Marek Kalita) show his submission to his new bride by dangling tea bags over his ears like the peyos of Chasidim. But these sharp moments never overwhelm the prevailing sentiment of lassitude and the threat this holds to a teetering society.

Faced with infusing life into a play that is essentially about apathy, Mr. Warlikowski meets Levin’s abstractions head-on. Some of his staging techniques burrow into the mind with immediate severity, as when he interrupts an intense, almost maudlin deathbed sequence by having Krum ask (in English) for volunteers from the audience, only to plunge instantly back into the scene. Others — a dreamscape complete with a sexy nurse and a masturbating Italian, the incessant rhythmic “fwoomp” and “shrik” of a skipping record in the background — constitute a sound argument for the implementation of a Hippocratic oath (“first do no harm”) for directors.

Still, from its stylistically nimble cast to the supple lighting design of Felice Ross, TR Warszawa clearly has the courage of its pretensions — there’s nothing faddish or epater le bourgeois about even its most self-indulgent conceits. Granted, this distinction may not have meant much to those muttering, “Wait, there’s no intermission?” at about the 90-minute mark, or to the others who voted with their feet throughout “Krum.” (Mr. Warlikowski stages some scenes with the house lights up, a choice that put a brief halt to the early departures.) But it does matter, and the longeurs gradually become almost noble in their hypnotic gloom.

An ineffectual doctor surfaces near the end of “Krum” with the closest thing to comfort that Levin’s beleaguered, benighted world has to offer. “Pray for senility,” he suggests to a grieving Krum. “You’ll get old and weak, and with weakness comes serenity. You won’t have the strength to be happy, but you also won’t have the strength to scream, protest or to suffer either.” For better and for worse, weakness and serenity are still far from the minds of Mr. Warlikowski and his intrepid company. Like the melancholy Tugati, they apply supreme effort to even the most workaday tasks. And by spotlighting these difficulties, they paradoxically make life seem that much easier.

Until October 20 (651 Fulton St., between Ashland and Rockwell places, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).