Borden, Lizzie

A casually absurd play about the infamous Lizzie Borden, presented by Bedlam, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event.There will be blood. And meat sauce. And dancing corpses. And Sharon Tate. Clarity? Not so much.Though, to be fair, if you aren’t ready for madness, perhaps a play about Lizzie Borden, presented by a theater company named Bedlam, isn’t your best bet.“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected. Yet this ornate display winds up feeling like a lot of show for an unimpressive payoff.But let’s begin with Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski), the woman from the gruesome children’s rhyme, who in 1892 took an ax and served 40 whacks in a double parricide that claimed the lives of her father and stepmother. Well, not an ax exactly, but a hatchet, as Bridget (Knox), the Borden family’s maid — and Lizzie’s kind-of lover — describes it. The weapon doesn’t actually appear until late in the first act, which comprises a series of domestic scenes in the Borden home, including interactions between Lizzie, Bridget, Lizzie’s father (Tony Torn), her young stepmother (Susannah Millonzi) and Uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson), on the day of the murders.From left, Susannah Millonzi as Lizzie’s young stepmother, Jamie Smithson as Uncle Nathan and Tony Torn as the Borden patriarch in “Fall River Fishing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead of opting for an “American Psycho”-style gorefest, “Fall River Fishing,” directed by Eric Tucker, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event, making the infamous real-life murders the anticlimax and continuing on from there. So from the start, we see onstage the bloodstained couch, the puddle of blood on the floor and red stains on the bed, though the characters sit and walk around the space as though everything is perfectly normal. Perhaps there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in this casually absurd play, which is packed from beginning to end with dark ironies. The most obvious being that the Bordens, despite wearing 19th-century fashion and sitting on 19th-century furniture, don’t just speak in contemporary English, but also make rather contemporary cultural references: to Cabbage Patch Kids, to the appeal of Greek yogurt, to the O.J. Simpson verdict.The dialogue is a constant stream of random quips, anachronisms, expletives, awkward gaffes and surprising non sequiturs. All of which is very funny — if that kind of quirkiness and drollery is your cup of tea. If not, you’ll struggle with the play’s humor, which may wear thin even for those enjoying it. After all, the play prioritizes its high-concept, heightened comedy over character building, plot or any of the usual forces behind a work’s momentum — so its engine runs out of steam almost immediately.It’s because of the no-holds-barred work of the cast and the director, however, that “Fall River” manages to stretch its charms for as long as it does (a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut by a full 60 to 90 minutes). Szadkowski proves to be an expert of deadpan humor from the first (unprintable) word she utters as Lizzie, who is both an insecure outcast and a selfish flirt with an endless need for attention. And, to make things worse, Lizzie is an aspiring actress who declares her performance as Nora in “A Doll’s House” — watch out, Jessica Chastain — her greatest feat.Knox’s Bridget makes a perfect pair with Szadkowski’s Lizzie, who strings the earnest maid along; Bridget follows Lizzie’s whims and bizarre scene studies, donning a wig and a pregnancy belly to play Sharon Tate (who makes an additional appearance). The Borden patriarch played by Torn is an unbearable misogynist, who wistfully recalls his first polyamorous marriage and the appeal of “foreign genitals, novel genitals,” courtesy of Tinder, with entertaining crudeness. Millonzi, as Lizzie’s alternately meek and vicious stepmother, performs her role with such otherworldly abandon that the character seems to have stepped out of her own universe, even within this already curious realm of weirdos and fools. Her physical performance is most impressive: She’s constantly draping herself over furniture, folding over suddenly and slouching around like a wet noodle. And Smithson is an utter delight as Uncle Nathan, a living, breathing cringe in the form of an adult man.After all of the jokes and the bloodshed and a brief waltz between the deceased, the play turns into a less interesting thought experiment in its second act, with Szadkowski and Smithson now playing a modern-day Nora and Torvald as they entertain some very bizarre guests. Soon everyone is digging into a bowl of spaghetti, hands-first, and rubbing it over their faces. By then “Fall River” has not only lost its steam, but also its appeal, and its last bit of sense.“This is nonsense!” Torvald/Nathan declares near the end of the production. True, but a little nonsense offers laughs and flights of imagination. Too much, and you leave the theater feeling mad.Fall River FishingThrough March 9 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More