Just being weird for the sake of being is just not enough. It takes a group of artists who can add flashes of creative genius and some social commentary to go beyond the territory of the merely curious to undiscovered countries of bizarre. The Ochre House brings the strange and so much more in their avant-garde production of Matthew Posey’s Morphing.

Posey writes, directs, and stars in this deconstruction of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with his typical eye for the twisted and macabre. O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a family dealing with the mother’s off-again-on-again addiction to morphine is already dark; however, Posey incorporates live music, dance, video performance, and a large man-eating puppet.

As the family journeys to vacation in Maine, mother Mary Bonner (Ochre regular Justin Locklear, in a bit of inspired cross-gender casting) is feeling scrutinized by her loved ones because of her colored past as a schmack user. Posey plays James Bonner, the family patriarch who tries to keep the peace.  Mr. Bonner is a detached and listless man with whiskey being his only comfort. Edmund Bonner (Trenton Stephenson), their youngest son, is an introspective, sensitive intellectual, and a Vietnam veteran with a troubling cough.

Jamie Bonner (Mitchell Parrack) is the eldest son who is also a fan of the bottle and a skirt-chasing ne’er-do-well to boot. Throw in Bridgette (Cyndee Rivera in a knockout, short-notice performance–Elizabeth Evans will rejoin the cast next week), the housekeeper with a severely pronounced, and unaccounted for cockney accent, a giant floozy puppet named Rosie (Rivera), and you have set the stage for some dusky domestic hijinks.

It’s a fractured comedy composed of disparate elements. The play is haphazard and disjointed at times (the nature of deconstruction), but well worth it for when these scattered bits come together. It’s not just a trip for trippin’ sake, and the acting matches Posey’s always prosaic prose.

Locklear’s Mary could have come off as a superficial drag performance in the vein of The Kids in the Hall, but the role becomes something wild, dreamy, and lyrical in Locklear’s hands. The whacked-out Mary playing electric guitar in a filmed piece is something beautiful to behold.

Posey carries some of the menace from his performance in The Butcher, but with some madcap whimsy as a nuclear father. Stephenson as Edmund represents the incredulous center of this familial maelstrom (not an easy task), and he carries it off with the variable diction of a young Christopher Walken. Parrack provides some nice-touch icky-ness to his role as the sleaze-ball brother.

Set and lighting design by Posey fit the play quite well, especially during the filmed vignettes/performance pieces that run independently and in the background during onstage action. Locklear’s original music is creepy and languorous.