The experience of watching The Charge of the Expormidable Moose is a lot like the experience of reading the play’s title. At first, it’s a little strange, a little off-putting, and very ambiguous. But eventually, its oddness becomes its appeal.

The Charge of the Expormidable Moose was originally written by Quebec playwright Claude Gauvreau in 1956, but it wasn’t performed until 1970, and didn’t earn its current status as a masterpiece of French theatre until years after Gauvreau died. After seeing the debut of its English translation by Ray Ellenwood, in a production by One Little Goat Theatre and director Adam Seelig, it’s easy to guess why the play’s success was delayed. It’s a complex, challenging work, but in capable hands it’s also a highly entertaining piece of theatre that is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

One of the strongest elements to Gauvreau’s script and Ellenwood’s translation is the masterful use of lyrical language. The title acts as a cue for verbal melodies that are to come—for example, the seven characters in the play are named Lontil-Deparey, Laura Pa, Becket-Bobo, Marie-Jeanne Commode, Letasse Cromagnon, Dydrame Daduve, and Mycroft Mixeudeim (also, fortunately, they typically refer to each other by their full names). In bright, cheery outfits that suggest they’re spending the day at the country club, on the golf course, or on the tennis court (thanks to costume designer Jackie Chau), these inhabitants of a mysterious country estate are delightfully bourgeois—or rather, their bourgeois nature is delightfully satirized.

Gauvreau’s absurdist exploration of sanity, psychology, art, and academia revolves around the mournful poet Mycroft Mixeudeim (Ben Irvine), stranded in a home with four of his contemporaries: Lontil-Deparey (David Christo), Laura Pa (Lindsey Clark), Becket-Bobo (Lindsay Owen Pierre), and Marie-Jeanne Commode (Jessica Salgueiro), who subject him to their merciless psychological experiments, tests, and tricks to analyze his mental condition. These range from convincing him to believe a mannequin is his deceased lover, to slipping mysterious liquids into his glass at dinner, to screaming randomly around the house to exploit Mycroft’s heroic impulse to ram head-first, hands posed like a moose’s antlers, into the set’s several doors and save whoever is in danger (hence the title). The troublesome foursome toss around diagnoses, while Mycroft’s only escape (and grasp on sanity) is to talk to himself inside a cabinet. That is, until a woman (Sochi Fried) crashes her helicopter on the estate’s grounds and becomes Mycroft’s ally. Unfortunately, an even more sinister presence arrives: the sadist Letasse Cromagnon (Hume Baugh), who propels the house into true torture.

Most of the first act is spent introducing the audience to the odd dynamic between Mycroft and his frenemies. The climax involves a tour-de-force physical performance from Irvine at dinnertime. The whole cast is strong, but the arrival of Fried and Baugh in act two really makes things interesting. Soon, Mycroft is less a poor victim and more a tragic hero, and his tormentors are revealed to be the flawed, insecure, jealous villains they are.

Gauvreau, part of Montreal’s famous art movement Les Automatistes, could be criticizing members of the medical, psychological, or artistic professions (probably all three) and it’s not hard to believe his surreal style was unappreciated in its time. Luckily Seelig, Ellenwood, and One Little Goat Theatre aren’t afraid to charge at it head-on.

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