“Mother Night,” the show closing Custom Made Theatre Companyu’s 18th season, is a ambitious piece of theater, attempting to distill Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel into a cohesive two-and-a-half-hour play. In that it’s remarkably successful. This world premiere adaptation written and directed by artistic director Brian Katz is wonderfully compelling in its twists and turns, nicely balancing Vonnegut’s wry humor with some awfully grim subject matter.

“Mother Night” is the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American-born writer living in Germany who becomes one of the chief propagandists for the Nazi regime. The story is framed as a memoir that he’s writing in prison in Israel before his trial for war crimes. We soon learn that the truth is more complicated, that he was acting as an American spy the whole time, but how much does that matter in the face of all the hateful rhetoric he spread to the masses in his official capacity?

Chris Morrell plays Campbell with a sardonic self-awareness that’s tremendously sympathetic, making it easy to follow him through some bad decisions and worse company. Morrell played the same character at Custom Made three years ago in Eric Simonson’s adaptation of another Vonnegut novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” also directed by Katz.

Campbell’s life story introduces us to a panoply of notorious Nazi masterminds and curiously chatty Israeli guards, each with his own haunting story of what he did to survive the Holocaust.

Megan Briggs is glamorous and playful as Helga, Campbell’s wife, who’s a German actress, with a refined presence that echoes the other key women in his life (also played by Briggs), such as his mother and Helga’s envious little sister. Dave Sikula is winningly warm and easygoing as Campbell’s good friend George Kraft, a Russian spy who’s been undercover so long that his cover identity is entirely sincere.

Everyone except Morrell portrays a variety of parts. Adam Neimann is a naive teenage Israeli guard amusingly ignorant of World War II, a Jewish American doctor who adamantly tries to forget it all, and a chillingly rationalizing Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief authors of the Holocaust. David Boyll plays various blustery Americans who’ll never forget or forgive what Campbell did. Catz Forsman brings an appealing touch of kookiness to a crazed American white supremacist conspiracy theorist, and A J Davenport is low-key and casual as Campbell’s cover U.S. intelligence contact (gender-switched from the novel).

It’s a story with many twists and turns, some of them shocking even when they’re relatively easy to see coming. Katz’s production accentuates the drama well with Maxx Kurzunski’s dark and moody lighting (despite some technical difficulties on opening night) in Daniel Bilodeau’s slightly claustrophobic plank-walled set dominated by a small typewriter table.

All the paranoid white supremacist rhetoric that Campbell cynically peddles and others enthusiastically believe would be chilling even if that sort of unabashedly racist and xenophobic discourse hadn’t wormed its way back into the mainstream cultural conversation in this country. With a renewed sense of how easy it actually is for a populace to start to succumb to its worst instincts, it’s all too easy to find contemporary parallels to the play’s theme that propagandists are complicit in every violent action that results from their overheated rhetoric.

At the same time, the tale doesn’t let anybody off the hook for what people do to get along when their world goes mad. They have to live with what they’ve done, if they can.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘MOTHER NIGHT’

By Kurt Vonnegut, adapted by Brian Katz, presented by Custom Made Theatre Company

Through: June 24

Where: Custom Made Theatre, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, one intermission

Tickets: $20-$42; 415-798-2682, www.custommade.org