Fans of La MaMa know the East Village culture center has its ups and downs. One moment the doggedly international schedule introduces something rich and strange to New York (last week’s “Odchodzi”); the next we’re suffering through yet another wildly uneven riff on Greek tragedy. But everything at the little red building on 4th Street, good or bad, is instructive.

In the latest offering at La MaMA, “Operetta,” which played over the weekend, the blurry line between class and stage disappeared. Zishan Ugurlu, a director in residence, brought her cast of Lang College theater students into the barn-like theater of the La MaMa Annex for what amounted to a spectacular class project. But instead of churning out another “Our Town,” Ms. Ugurlu used the academic exercise to make something genuinely experimental. Ms. Ugurlu’s extraordinarily detailed design and a brand-new score for Witold Gombrowicz’s upsetting comedy made something luscious out of the learning curve.

Gombrowicz is himself the stuff of theater classrooms – his name figures alongside Mrozek’s and Witkacy’s as the Eastern European playwrights to beat. Despite being written in the 1960s, their works can still disorient and delight modern audiences: Forty years of further experiment have left them surprisingly fresh.

In this final play by Gombrowicz, a court full of dilettantes and class struggle collapses under its own weight. At first in hints (a pissed-off proletarian ruffian goes by the name “Joseph”), and then in hilariously blunt fashion, Gombrowicz illustrates the European aristocracy at its most confused. Torture and genocide be damned, his courtiers seem most bemused by the fascists’ and communists’ refusal to dress well.

Ms. Ugurlu used the vast space to construct a giant loom – first seamstresses and then imprisoned noblewomen have to drag a giant shuttle across its entire surface. A 10-foot-high wooden horse cantered by, a cast of dozens sang Stefania de Kenessey’s odd, chanting music while rolling around on office chairs, and a woman appeared dressed as a dining room table.

Only two actors kept up with the visual jokes – Max Pingeon as the heroic fashion designer Fior and Sean Jones as the dissolute count Charmant. But Ms. Ugurlu constructed such a dazzling spectacle that the individual weaknesses in her cast nearly got lost in the glare.

When uptown theaters “stunt cast,” they see if Britney Spears will sing in “Sweet Charity.” When La MaMa goes for the big names, it plumps for the stars of the Living Theater. Presiding over Gombrowicz’s weird court are a prince and princess, here played by the doyenne of Protest Theater, Judith Malina, and her artistic consort, Hanon Reznikov. Appropriately enough, the Living Theater is celebrating 60 years of experimental theater making this Sunday (at the 92nd Street Y). But at La MaMa this weekend, they were teaching the next generation, and all while wearing lampshades on their heads.