Besides being in the running for Owner of the World's Most Glamorous Name, Katjana Vadeboncoeur plays the maternal hen Aunt Julia in blahblahblahBANG at On the Boards. To make a point of it, she sips then spits up her tea into a cup, complete with birdlike neck spasms, and hands it to her beloved, coddled nephew Yorgen Tesman -- who drinks it, onstage, to an audience of wrinkled noses. If you're an Ibsen fan (blahblahblahBANG is WET's precocious interpretation of Hedda Gabler) this subtextual underlining may just elicit a desire to see the original. The difference here is that it's not a matter of moral fiber or willfulness. WET's cast reacts to their socially caged life with the stereotyped behavior of unhappy parrots, literally climbing the walls. Again and again, WET reminds you that they are real people doing real things, disgusting, sexy, risky things. If it's not "perfect," it's compelling as a high-wire act.

F. Scott Fitzgerald hypothesized in Gatsby that personality was "an unbroken series of successful gestures" -- in blahblahblahBANG, personality is under attack, and even the successful gestures are doomed to fail. Thankfully, they're also spectacular: a trippy '60s movie outtake where Hedda practices marksmanship on her paranoia, a burlesque/softcore porn striptease and drunken hook-up (just like in the back room of the Comet), an aerial act suicide.

Marya Sea Kaminski plays a suspiciously-ticking-package of a Hedda Gabler with a too-bright smile and a chuckling laugh so engaging and sincere it could be sold to a sitcom laughtrack. Lathrop Walker, as Yorgen, left us almost at a loss for words. He's completely natural as the hedgehoggy, speed-talking young academic who expects the world to hand him happiness with his PhD -- the kind you can't throw a rock near a graduate school without hitting. Alexandra Tavares, Seattle's answer to Helena Bonham Carter, is Thea Elvstead, the not-quite brainy beauty and ex of Eilert's who falls for the disreputable, comeback-making professor Eilert Lovbourg (Colin Byrne), an ex of Hedda's. Scott Jamrog's henhouse-raiding Brack, a bantam rooster of a lawyer with a roving eye, amuses himself with the maid/family pet Berta (Mikano Fukaya) whenever he's left alone for a second.

In short, blahblahblahBANG transmogrifies Ibsen into WET's own post-graduate lives, backed by a Radiohead/Bowie soundtrack and given unusual depth by their clique-ish familiarity as an ensemble group. There's little of the old Scandinavian seer's austerity, but in trade there's a lot more lunatic life in this particular asylum. We just wish the two-hour show had an intermission. It runs through the 17th, tickets $18.