THE FEAST OF THE FLYING COW

Through Nov. 20, Interact Theatre Company at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-568-8079, www.interacttheatre.org

The first moment is the best. Somewhere in a contemporary war-torn country, a ravaged apartment is hit by another shell. More plaster falls from the ceiling. Anya, the lady of the house (and shell-shocked herself), mechanically grabs a broom and sweeps. It is, as the saying goes, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- a moment of genuinely tragic comedy.

We might like to know. But the trouble with Feast is a creative imagination run amok. Mahoney's script veers, without any sense of control, from broad farce to dark absurdism, and doesn't stop careening till we hit sentimental realism (shades of Come Back, Little Sheba, of all things).

The farcical stuff is too broad and too blunt; delivered at the fever pitch of sketch comedy, it grows very tiresome very fast. (It's also wildly inconsistent -- if Anya and Izak haven't seen food in weeks, why do they ignore Audrey's banquet throughout a nearly 40-minute scene?) By the end of Act 1, you'll wonder if there's any place for this play to go.

There is, and Acts 2 and 3 of Feast -- less overt, more nuanced -- are an improvement, sometimes even cleverly provocative. On the other hand, the links between acts are so tenuous that you'll think you missed something during the intermissions. (A metaphor in Act 3 finds one character perplexed to near madness by lights that go on and off. I know just how he feels.)

Interact throws a lot of energy at Feast (a world premiere), with director Seth Rozin and his able actors committing fully to the bold style. But in the end, I'm not sure it matters. A major rewrite -- one that found a cohering tone -- would certainly help Mahoney's script. Still, I wonder: Is there any point to this kind of parody in a real world where Condi Rice shops at Ferragamo while a major city washes away? Now that's theater of the absurd. The rest is just satire, which -- as George S. Kaufman told us -- closes on Saturday night.