Wormwood by the Polish troupe Theatre of the Eighth Day.

Theater artists from Poland have made some wild impressions on New Haven theatergoers over the years. The filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directed two plays at the Yale Repertory Theatre in the 1970s. Some of us are still buzzing about that night two decades ago when the legendary Polish political cabaret troupe Cellar Under the Rams rocked the Palace Theatre on College Street. Fifteen years back, Liz Diamond directed an outstanding production of Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York at the Yale Rep. In 2004, Yale feted the birth centenary of Witold Gombrowicz with a conference and play-reading. This past summer the Krakow-based Katona Jozsef Theatre Company's peripatetic postmodern take on Chekhov's Ivanov was one of the highlights of the 2009 International Festival of Arts & Ideas; in 2008, the same fest offered a reading of Death of the Squirrel Man by contemporary Polish playwright Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk.

A visit from Teatr Ósmego Dnia, aka Theatre of the Eighth Day, with its iconic work Wormwood, is thus long overdue. From the 1960s to the 1980s, when Poland was under Communist rule, Tot8D laid the groundwork for some of the political performance provocations that we now regularly associate with exported experimental Polish theater. Adapted from Tadeusz Konwicki's comic novel A Minor Apocalypse and originally developed through an improvisational technique based on the iconic work of mid-20th century experimental theater pioneer Jerzy Grotowski, Wormwood's returning to Tot8D's repertory 20 years after its incendiary debut. The Polish government targeted the original production, because it was fearful of its candid depiction of life under martial law. It was part of a string of reprisals that forced Tot8D underground and eventually out of Poland altogether. The company returned in 1989 at the invitation of Solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki and is now based in the city of Poznan.

Polish theater is invariably high energy with press releases and European reviews referring to Tot8D as "harrowing," "brutally physical" and "uncompromising." Cool. The 60-minute, four-actor, one-musician, super-titled, talkback-augmented production of Wormwood plays Yale's Iseman Theatre (1156 Chapel St. 203-432-1234) on Nov. 5-7 (8 p.m. $10-$35) thanks to the combined forces of the university's graduate School of Drama and the undergraduate Theater Studies Program's World Performance Project. Following the New Haven gig, Tot8D hits New York, where it will be one of the opening salvos in a major, multi-sponsor series, "Performing Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe."