What Christopher Guest did for dwarves at Stonehenge in “This Is Spinal Tap,” the Wooster Group now does for Poles at the Acropolis, or rather, Poles in “Akropolis,” the well-known (in some circles) drama by Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theater, based on a text by Stanislaw Wyspianski, in which hysterical Poles, channeling Trojan-era Greeks, wail in Polish, thrash their arms, and beseech the gods for compassion. Well, folks, I have seen “Spinal Tap,” and this is not “Spinal Tap.”

There’s much fun to be had in poking fun at pop culture targets like doomed-to-fail rock bands, folk singers, and dog lovers. But the goal of “Poor Theater” is to send up the abstruse, perverse dictates of experimental theater (Grotowski), art (Max Ernst), and dance (William Forsythe and Ballet Frankfurt), as well as the groups who strive to incorporate those dictates into their work – notably, the Wooster Group itself. But how do you mock a mocker? It’s like making faces at a circus clown: Grimace as you might, he’s the one that gets the applause.

The show’s title echoes a famous collection of dramatic principles Grotowski set down for his actors in the 1960s called “Towards a Poor Theatre.” In it, he wrote, “No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in theatre.” He rejected elaborate lighting, sets, and costumes; he wanted actors to communicate through the “translumination” of their psyches, bodies, and instinct, although communicate is a wishful term. “Infinite variation of performer-audience relationships is possible,” he wrote, uninterested in whether most audiences want much more of a relationship with actors beyond watching them, and being stirred by what they see.

The actors in Elizabeth LeCompte’s production at the Performing Garage – Ari Fliakos, Sheena See, Scott Shepherd, and Kate Valk – are splendid. They have got “infinite variation” down. But the material they are working with is not worthy of their effort. In Part I, centered on Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theater and a trip the Wooster Group made to Wroclaw in 2003, audience members sit at attention like grad students in a comp-lit seminar on “The Anxiety of Influence,” registering their professor’s apercus with knowing snickers, and fidgeting when concentration wanders.

As flat-screen monitors relay video footage, or freeze on the stage like a lobby cam, the actors attempt to ape the techniques of their august Polish hosts, contorting their faces, manipulating their chins as if they were ventriloquists’ dummies who needed their jaws oiled, and chanting nonsense syllables. A mock Pole (Mr. Fliakos) translates a screening of “Akropolis” for the visiting delegation of actors, and they crane their necks, trying to understand.

“We know what means Akropolis, you know it’s a symbol….and what they said – they only come once a year. ” he explains to the visitors in condescending tones, as shrieking footage plays. The translator’s English is gibberish; and for a while, the difficulty and pointlessness involved in the act of trying to decode an arrogant foreigner’s glosses is amusing. But when the cast performs a run-through of “Akropolis,” and Messrs. Shepherd and Fliakos rant in Polish in unison for 20 minutes straight, screaming “Dazh mne sto godny” (apologies to Polish speakers – I have no idea what they actually said, but that was somewhat close), the sound is deafening, provoking the novel audience-performer reaction: Make it stop.

Last year, a thrilling experimental performance in an actual garage, “KI From Crime” – Kama Ginkas’s adaptation of “Crime and Punishment,” showed that performance can transcend language. Oksana Mysina, as Katerina Ivanovna, electrified the audience, speaking nearly entirely in Russian. But she had a good story to draw on. Like the comp-lit lecturers who gravely inform students that language has no meaning, dramatists who believe that a compelling storyline is not a crucial component of any successful drama lack common sense.

The second part of the show mostly takes the form of an improvised lecture by William Forsythe (played by Mr. Shepherd), the choreographer and Wooster Group associate, who rabbits on discursively about his dance theories (“You don’t need choreography to dance”) as Ms. Valk and Mr. Fliakos, playing members of Mr. Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, cavort behind him, jumping, kicking, making “Flashdance” lunges or locking legs and tussling. Joining the antics, Mr. Shepherd / Mr. Forsythe says flatly, “People think it’s a kind of free-for-all … I wish.”

The company’s ribbing of the choreographer is meant to be affectionate, but anyone who has seen and loved the dancing of Ballet Frankfurt knows that the intricacy and grace of Mr. Forsythe’s improvised movement far exceeds the pajama-party antics jokily portrayed here. At about the same time that he recorded his “Poor Theater” philosophy, Grotowski also wrote in the essay “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un” that “There are banalities of work on improvisation, just as there are banalities of work on form and structures.” There may be banalities in the theories Mr. Forsythe expounds off the cuff, but in practice, you can tell the dancer from the rants.

The Wooster Group’s most recent prior production, a revival of their fiendishly inventive “House/Lights,” showed that their signature theatrical method (which owes a debt to Grotowski) can work stage magic. In “House/Lights,” they dove into challenging texts – Gertrude Stein’s “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” the 1960s cult film “Olga’s House of Shame,” Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” – and loosely overlaid them with other elements – flat-screen monitors, computer bleeps, a snake puppet, songs and dance, with choreographic collaboration from Trisha Brown.

Then as now, the audience had to exert itself to put together the pieces. But with “Poor Theater,” the pieces don’t knit together. What began as an inside joke has been turned into a joke on the audience.

Until October 15 (33 Wooster Street, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-868-4444).