It’s no wonder Polish playwright and painter Witkacy wrote a play called They about art’s idiosyncratic, transgressive nature. The man was bounds ahead of his time, anticipating absurdist theater by a generation; “they” labeled him eccentric and denied him recognition until his death. Buck Skelton’s production of Witkacy’s 1920 work is the play’s American premiere, and it’s a shame it took so long: It’s an intriguingly strange, blackly funny piece. They’s single act unfolds in the villa of aesthete and windbag Callisto Balandash (played to overdone perfection by Brian Allard) and tracks developments after Balandash gets new neighbors: a shadow-government committee to whom Cubism is a stumbling block on the path to a society of “automation.” Peering from behind beautifully wrought commedia dell’arte masks, They’s characters pinball in dialogue from intellectual trend to intellectual trend, decimating each with vapidity and contradiction. In the end, only one truism (and only one of Balandash’s Picassos) is left standing: “Art is social lawlessness” and, perpetually and in all places, the law is coming to town.

Where: The Back Door Theater
Phone: 236-8734
Address: 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Website: boxofficetickets.com/go/event?id=163085