Review: Delightfully crazed 'Dead Mother' packs in a lot

A dissatisfied theatergoer tells us she wants "to see more plays with heterosexual characters" for a change. A man gets into a debilitating argument with his mother, playing both roles at the same time. Actors perform several scenes simultaneously. One scene is narrated by actors at music stands. Alice B. Toklas makes a guest appearance. So do a sheep, various Greek gods and a sperm whale. Though nobody actually gets naked, graphic nudity and explicit sex acts are depicted as well.

David Greenspan's "Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain," which opened Sunday at Traveling Jewish Theatre, is a raucously funny, magnetic and penetrating comedy made up of one and-now-for-something-completely-different element after another. Metaphysics combines with metatheatrics and post-Freudian psychology in a family farce that's part dream play, part lampoon, part digressions on anti-Semitism, homophobia and the erotics of dental hygiene, and ultimately a surprisingly multifaceted portrait of what seemed to be a stock-comic mother from hell.

It's also a theatrical minefield of astonishingly fast-paced verbal arias and acting and staging challenges, impressively handled by director Tony Kelly and a terrific cast in an unusual joint production. The West Coast premiere of "Mother" is the season opener for both TJT and Thick Description, featuring members of both companies (including Thick co-founder Kelly and TJT co-founder Corey Fischer).

The stage is a maze of bewildering patterns of thin, brightly colored lines (set and lights by Rick Martin). The action takes off from a simple, outrageous conceit. Daniel (a delightfully flustered Gabriel Marin) persuades his older brother, Harold (Liam Vincent), to pose as their dead mother, Shirley - which makes marginal farcical sense because this seems to be the only way either brother can get married.

No costume change is involved. With the mere addition of pearls, Vincent turns in a tour-de-force comic and touching performance in the simultaneous roles of Harold and Shirley, progressively topping himself with Greenspan's startlingly original verbal pyrotechnics. He's far from alone in that department. Dena Martinez opens the play with a wonderfully comic-erotic dream monologue as Harold's unfulfilled wife, Sylvia. Fischer masterfully delivers an aged man's aria on flossing and Toklas' intriguing variations on Dante's "Divine Comedy." The magnificent Deb Fink, as Daniel's intended, Maxine, brings down the house with an astonishingly convoluted and illuminating invitation to go see a show.

That's where the Greek gods come in, not to mention some of Raul Aktanov's most inventive costumes, Marin's engagingly obscene Trojan youth Paris and Fink's brilliantly bawdy Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Meanwhile, Harold's channeling of his mother confounds and unmasks his seemingly henpecked father (well played by Louis Parnell), and leads him to better understand both his mother and himself.

It's all highly convoluted, at times a bit precious and somewhat abrupt in coming to a conclusion (it would help if Sylvia's story were more fully developed). But "Mother" is also delightfully challenging, blissfully heady, continually surprising and great good fun.

Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain: Farce. By David Greenspan. Directed by Tony Kelly. (Through Feb. 17. Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. One hour, 50 minutes. Tickets $31-$34. Call (800) 838-3006 or visit www.atjt.com.)

E-mail Robert Hurwitt at rhurwitt@sfchronicle.com.