‘Victims of Duty’ Enters a Surreal World of Angst

Clinging to cliches like continuity of plot and character will only get you in trouble at Eugene Ionesco’s “Victims of Duty,” especially given Frederique Michel’s full-throttle staging for Santa Monica’s City Garage.

The signature non sequiturs, jarring emotional shifts and irrational behavior in the Romanian-born playwright’s 1952 absurdist farce remain perplexing and disturbing to this day. But that’s not to say the piece is devoid of message or meaning--rather, it follows its own surreal logic of dreamlike associations in a subversive assault on convention.

A smug bourgeois couple find their complacency disrupted by a sinister detective (Wolf Bauer) investigating one of their neighbors. The initially comic interrogation hurls the placid husband (Joel Drazner) down an increasingly painful spiral of memories into a primal abyss of fear and confusion, where even his identity is no longer certain.

Drazner’s oafish befuddlement is picture-perfect--Ozzie Nelson trapped in a Kafka inquisition--but the exposed nerves of his angst could play with sharper conviction. Though Bauer makes a steely and relentless interrogator, his blond ponytail and double-breasted suit are a better fit at GQ than HQ--an incongruity that muddies his eventual comeuppance at the hands of a raving artist (Stephen Pocock), with its implicit creative retaliation against a drab status quo.

The female leads, Rebecca Gray and Liz Hight, are superb, handling their even more varied and demanding transitions with deceptive ease. As the repressed wife, Gray starts out so stiff she’s actually balancing a ponderous tome on her head, then mutates into a sultry sexpot strutting her stuff for the implacable detective. Hight’s mischievous, flirty maid is amusingly buffeted between covertly gratifying her impulses and carrying out her increasingly incomprehensible duties--a plight with which we can all identify.

* “Victims of Duty,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 (alley) 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 12. $17.50 (Sunday is pay-what-you-can). (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.