A polished glimpse of life's dirty details

Brenda Withers (left) and Stacy Fischer in ''The Mistakes Madeline Made'' at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. (JIM DALGLISH)

WELLFLEET - Have you ever suffered under a supervisor so relentlessly chipper that bossicide seemed the only sane solution? In Elizabeth Meriwether's scintillatingly dark comedy "The Mistakes Madeline Made," flawlessly rendered by Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, sardonic slacker Edna is the 15th personal assistant-in-waiting to a megarich family we never see, and her immediate superior is a perky despot named Beth who micro-manages every last detail of the clan's daily life, down to the type of Handi-Wipes - imported in bulk from Appalachia - to be tucked into the 6-year-old scion's snack pack.

Less than enthralled by the scope of her duties, Edna (Brenda Withers) harbors murderous impulses toward Beth ("I want to cover her in dirt") and plots to sabotage her endeavors. To do so, Edna enlists the aid of another office malcontent, Wilson (the restrained yet hilarious Jonathan Fielding, whose great joy in life is mimicking the sounds made by the copy machine. Reputed to be the victim of a hedge-fund "accident" of some sort, Wilson is beyond odd, but so too, as we soon discover, is Edna.

When not bungling her duties, Edna drifts off into fugue states in which she re-lives conversations with her recently deceased brother, Buddy (Robert Kropf), a war correspondent killed in Iraq. Before dismissing Edna as "blind" and naive and storming back to the front, Buddy experienced a slight psychotic break. Although he'd been temporarily bedding down in Edna's bathtub, he refused to actually bathe in it - or anywhere else, for that matter.

Honoring his memory, Edna embarks on a similar course of ablutophobia and stops washing - the last straw for the finicky Beth (Stacy Fischer magically turns this Martha Stewart-style domestic hellhound into a semi-sympathetic figure). Edna also engages in a series of compulsive, mutually degrading sexual encounters. Her prey of choice - again, in homage to her brother - consists of writers, preferably bad, pretentious ones (played serially with gusto by director Brendan Hughes). Meanwhile, Wilson, who turns out to be a sweetheart as well as a weirdo, takes on the superhuman task of trying to return Edna to the hygienic, nonodorous human fold.

The plot may sound like heavy sledding, and potentially gross to boot, but the script is witty and ultimately touching. It's a perfect match for the multitudinous talents of WHAT's fledgling summer repertory company. "Mistakes" plays as if written to order for these bold young performers.

And as for the mysterious Madeline, whose name you won't find among the cast of characters? A hapless young wife who flubs her marriage by failing to accord her husband sufficient attention, she appears only in a cautionary vignette that Edna savors in a self-help book by Dr. Joyce Brothers (Edna appreciates the latter's "vibrant sense of blame").

That ironic little bit of arcana is typical of Meriwether's sly wit. Sure, attention must be paid, but how much and when and to whom? No one can elude survivor's guilt; that lesson resonates through the play like a depth charge. The overprivileged family that employs both Edna and Beth acts on the premise that it's possible to insulate oneself from life's less pleasant surprises. Edna has come to know better, and she's willing to go to great lengths to sound an unwelcome warning.