Well, they don't call it the Ex for nothing. Questionable meanings and meaningful questions form the heart of the singularly brave and bizarre "The Hyacinth Macaw," a challenging play filled with vibrant language, energetic acting and the disconcerting sense that often there are times when neither audience nor actors know exactly what is happening. Ultimately, "Macaw" affirms that we are challenged most when the familiar is made strange, but at the same time illustrates some dangers in doing so.

The play begins innocently enough: on a sleepy day in Bug River, a respectably-dressed stranger, William Hard, visits a mother, Dora, and daughter, Susannah, to deliver a message about their father, the amiably named Ray. The mystery of the stranger and the contents of the letter, however, gradually give rise to a series of colorfully existentialist and epistemological revelations, odd cultic rituals involving trousers and the moon, and a great deal of hemming and hawing over both. One could describe the plot--basically, Ray is actually a duplicate husband, mildly deviant, that William Hard must replace--but it is in essence less interesting, for all its gratuitous weirdness, than the atmosphere it engenders. In the play, Hard comes from the Land of Evening (named after a quote from Heidegger, no less); just so does the audience begin to feel like foreigners in the universe of the play.

Furthermore, everything is couched in vivid, passionate language, by turns profound and stirring, agonizing and impenetrable. At times, it acquires a poetic, almost musical tone; indeed, by the end, the play largely abandons meaning in favor of the pure beauty of words. But even through the middle of the play, the dense language poses no small challenge. The play consists of lengthy monologues--often delivered just a little too quickly--which leave one struggling to keep up. Revelations about the banality and fakeness of existence are liberally spiced with whimsical references and odd metaphors.

In a play where it is so difficult to understand what people are saying, therefore, the actors do remarkably well in surviving the onslaught of their own words. Alexis Susman, as Dora, employs the same "oh-me-oh-my" domestic manner when hanging out clothes to dry as she does in her protracted monologues about how frustrating existence is. Playing the petulant, wise daughter, complete with short skirt and skates, Alex Marolachakis as Sue, a.k.a. Squeezer (a childhood nickname), parallels the audience's experience as she constantly questions the absurdity of all that is happening ("None of my friend's parents talk like this," she exclaims at one point). Saadi Soudavar is inspired as Ray, chronicling his life's struggle with his "urges," while he clambers onto a table and kicks the dishes.

But one can sense the actors struggling to make this material work. Often they seem to resort to a technique of breathless delivery leading up to a climactic outburst, which is then followed by a quiet philosophical one-liner or two. This boiling-tea-pot method has great effects the first few times--Ray's march on the table, Dora's astonishing tirade on a swing--but can later get almost rhythmically repetitive. When Dora throws a tray to the ground suddenly after a discussion with her daughter, we are no longer shocked--there have been too many outbursts already.

But Freidrich Abendsland, as the ever-confident yet consistently odd William Hard, manages to keep us balancing on the razor's edge of discomfort at which the play's confusion aims. He manages this wonderfully, despite having to deliver tiresome recurring jokes about a mysterious element called tantalum.

Ron Avni, however, as Mad Wu, is saddled with a thankless job: with little place in the plot, or in the world, he arrives to serenade Dora with a relentlessly ironic lounge song about himself, his song and her. If there is something to frustrate the audience in this play--and there is much that is on the border between challenging originality and frustrating whimsy--it is his character. The self-conscious Other (he is a self-described "Chinaman" seeking to break stereotypes about homeless people), he mischievously implies with a quavering song that he is in on all the play's tricks, and we desperately wish he would tell us.

Finally, it would be a disservice to the play to omit mention of the various other experimental devices or odd techniques. These range from the set pregnant with meaning (the plain soil of a garden; the sexually suggestive rope of a swing) to the rather obtrusive lighting (a programmed sequence of flashes as Dora polishes a plate). The sun seems to rise and set in the same place, or never to set; a moon figures prominently as well. Singing crops up now and again unexpectedly. Sound effects--a car starting, space-aged boings--provide a sort of EKG for the consciousness of the characters.

To be sure, all this only covers a part of the play: two or three viewings would probably give a fuller understanding of all that the play seeks to question and propose (a concept of "graduality," the exact meaning of the rituals). As it is, however, the play is rather lengthy because of its ponderous monologues. In addition, a certain rushed atmosphere underlies much of the production: rapidly delivered lines, pauses that tended to break up the timing of the speech, a struggle with props painfully lit up in silhouette.

Yet there is definitely something there, and one wonders how the play might have turned out if the material were somehow a little bit more manageable and polished. At times one might even think that the genre is wrong: as a radio play the musicality of the monologues, the ritual speeches, and the sound effects would come across very well as would the more expressive silences. But so long as one overlooks the difficulties that no doubt come with the new territory, "The Hyacinth Macaw" certainly offers a philosophical challenge, if not always a cohesive play.