“Are you okay?” Blake (Raymond Scannell) asks his brother Sean (Tadhg Murphy) halfway through the first act of “The Walworth Farce,” performed this weekend at Zellerbach Hall. These comforting words are delivered as Blake faces the audience and Sean kneels in humility, as if he were asking us if we’re okay. After every nasty yet hilarious line begets another in this folie-à-trois of father and sons in a decrepit London flat, this question is a warm and welcome sigh of relief. While “The Walworth Farce” considers itself a comedy, it is actually an extremely dark dissection of family troubles and repressed memories. One moment we’re slapping our knees in  amusement, and the next we’re sent reeling from the psychological torture exacted onstage.

Played with manic embellishment by Michael Glenn Murphy, Dinny is a brain surgeon—oh, the irony—cooping his two twenty-something sons up in a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment, the set of which brandishes astonishing verisimilitude. An Irish family, the three men toil their days away inside living off a stipend from the deceased mother. Only Sean is allowed to leave the flat, and that is to purchase chicken, a piece of bread, and a package of pink wafers. Forced to reenact years of family history every day and night, from which the sons are utterly traumatized, the men use these props to reincarnate moments spent with their dead mother. They also invoke erratic scenarios involving other family members with whom they shared their formative years.

In this disturbing play, cross-dressing, slapstick, and soliloquy are invoked to perform these traumatic and comical memories, fashioning Enda Walsh’s spectacular play as something like meta-theater. Within the flat, the men are real people who are also actors, who are of course played by actors Scannell, Murphy and Murphy, giving this tour de force a multidimensional flourish.

Things go awry at the end of the first act with the arrival of Hayley (Mercy Ojelade), the cashier from whom Sean buys groceries, who comes to the door like a cheery, beaming deus ex machina. What ensues in the second act is an indescribable romp, stitch-burstingly hilarious yet also profoundly unsettling. There is kidnapping, bloodshed and blackface, all which quickly mold “The Walworth Farce” into The Walworth nightmare.

Most remarkably, playwright Edna Walsh and director Mikel Murfi manage to sustain the comedy throughout both acts while also grappling with the terror of latent memories coming to fruition. The family history we come to know and understand in the first act is quickly thwarted in the second act as details become more and more hazy. In one particularly memorable scene, the three men perform a comedy at stage left while Ojelade personifies tragedy at stage right. The dichotomy between comedy and tragedy is dissolved literally and figuratively onstage before us.

Though comprised of four actors, every performance in “The Walworth Farce” is expertly executed, providing the laughs while delivering the shocks. Michael Glenn Murphy will undoubtedly remain etched in your memory long after the gut-wrenching final scene as one of the most psychotic and fascist parents in contemporary theatre. Mercy Ojelade is a cogent female presence in a cramped set chock full of males who happen to be chock full of crazy. Both Tadhg Murphy and Raymond Scannell, in their verbal and nonverbal evocations, perpetuate the kind of demasculated sheltered children Walsh’s script solicits.

Every gut-busting line and melee in “The Walworth Farce” is accompanied by an inevitable cringe as well as gratitude that this isn’t your family. And yet, in so many ways, the threesome isn’t that far removed from real family dynamics either, and this is perhaps the most unsettling part of the play. Walsh raises intriguing questions that don’t require answers. If they did, I wouldn’t want to know what they might be.

Image courtesy Cal Performances