A textbook case of absurd humor

In the same way, Eugene Ionesco’s play itself, now at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater’s original Harbor Stage, at first seems so familiar that you may find yourself wondering why you needed to see it again. But the freshness and insouciance of Brendan Hughes’s production - along with the crisp, deeply funny performances he elicits from an excellent cast - soon come to make it feel irresistible, darkly hilarious, and strikingly new. This is not your grandfather’s “Bald Soprano.’’

Of course, it may still be your grandfather’s cousin’s next-door neighbor’s great-niece’s “Soprano,’’ because Ionesco’s delight in the brain cramp that results from trying to parse such relationships remains essential to the play’s animating spirit. He was, as every high-school French student knows, inspired to write the play by a textbook of English-language instruction, in which the attempt to weave together a multitude of useful words for relationships and everyday objects soon reduces every “conversation’’ to giddy ridiculousness.

This can at times make the play repetitive to the point of tedium - but then it pushes past the tedium to become ridiculous again. The secret to making this work, to keeping the inanity amusing rather than annoying, lies in the ability of actors and director to find a precise and delicate rhythm for every exchange. And that’s exactly what the WHAT production does.

The performers playing Ionesco’s two couples - Lewis D. Wheeler and Amanda Collins as Mr. and Mrs. Martin, Jonathan Fielding and Brenda Withers as Mr. and Mrs. Smith - share a perky, oblivious blandness that masks their intelligence and comic skill. These characters are the cheerful suburbanites whom you dread encountering at the Little League game or the neighborhood cookout, avatars of banality and pompous self-regard.

But what’s nightmarish in life is hilarious onstage. The scene in which the four of them sit anxiously on opposite sofas, smiling blankly and starting to speak, then pausing, then casting “meaningful’’ glances at one another, is pure comic torture. It’s the worst dinner party you’ve ever been to, magnified to the point of hysterical laughter.

And then the fireman shows up. Played by Hughes himself (uncredited), he’s as peripheral yet essential to the action as is the Smiths’ housemaid, Mary (Dakota Shepard): Outsiders to the central tennis match of the two couples, they both contribute to the absurdity and place it in high relief against the backdrop of the outside world. What could seem a random intrusion - why a fireman? - here feels organically connected to the themes of the play: ridiculous, but right.

Ted Vitale’s clean-lined bright set, sharply lit by Bridget K. Doyle, combines with Raquel Zarin’s ’60s Pop-ish costumes to create a crisply imagined, coherent visual world for all these antics. It’s like a cartoon of suburbia, simplified and tweaked just enough to reveal itself as the surreal universe it is. Nathan Leigh’s quirkily sprightly music, like a hip reinvention of some sitcom theme song that never was, adds the ideal aural counterpoint.

But the genius moment of the production is one that it would be unfair to describe, because it comes as a quick, perfect surprise near the end. It’s like an encapsulation of the entire production in one brilliantly realized moment: clever, amusing, and then unexpectedly something more, a magician’s jerking of the tablecloth that rearranges all the elements of comedy into a chilling glimpse of the existential void.

Just a glimpse, though. And then the silliness bubbles back up, and the balance is intact. We’re reminded, as in the jokes of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot’’ or the black humor of Pinter’s “Birthday Party,’’ what absurdism really is: a precarious, hilarious, heartbreaking unicycle ride along the edge of a cliff.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.