It was a strange twist of fate. Early in last year's run of her original piece Oh Lost Weekend, Carol Triffle severely injured her knee. For those few who saw the show before the run was cancelled, it wasn't a surprise to hear that there had been a mishap. After all, Triffle clambered upon high walls of mesh fencing, swung wildly from the rafters, and dove into water tanks like a zanni impersonating Esther Williams. What was surprising was that Triffle injured herself while turning to walk down a short flight of steps that led to the audience, one of the few moments in the show that could be accused of being ordinary. But the good news is that Triffle is now well, and this amazing show--an absurdist festival of song, dance and jest that shows Triffle at the height of her clowning powers--is back up and running.

Oh Lost Weekend starts with a crêpe-thin plot that explodes into spectacle; perhaps the nearest analogy would be the traditional buffoon car at the circus, where a thousand clowns spill from the smallest vehicle. A woman named Vickie Brown (Triffle) of Goshen, N.Y., is accused of treason for impersonating Queen Victoria of London, England. Tagged as mad, she's shipped off to the bughouse, where she becomes the center of attention for a demented doctor and judge. Frocked in black robes, these Cruikshankian professionals bedevil poor Vickie, and though her mystery is never solved, it soon becomes clear that we are inside Vickie's mind. Quelle surprise, it's a fairly confused spot.

As the creator and lead performer of Oh Lost Weekend, Triffle anchors the piece in the traditions of the European cirque. The Demetri Pavlatos-engineered set is a 19-foot-high metal cage, a hive of voices and movement. There are numerous examples of staggering stagecraft, particularly when Triffle descends into her cell while standing on a swinging bed, and in the finale where she endures an ordeal by water, performing a fluid, subaquatic dance of dreamlike beauty.

For this critic, the finest moment (though ironically the most dangerous) occurred when Triffle came off the stage to engage the audience in a game of catch with a pretend ball, which she would toss and then catch in a paper bag. From there, she returned to the teeming cage, placing the bag on her head as a crown, then scaled the cage to a catwalk above, where she overheard a heated debate about her case below. Upon opening a trapdoor to better hear the argument, she suddenly fell, Alice-wise, not only through the trapdoor but through her taffeta dress as well, landing at the feet of her enemies, clad only in an institutional shift. It remains one of the finest pieces of clowning I've ever witnessed.

This is far from a lost weekend.