Oh boy. Ok. Here we go.

Anyone who’s read my reviews of Remy Bummpo productions over the years understands I am a major fan. In an April 2014 critique of the company’s “Our Class,” I referred to Remy as “doing some of the finest work in mid-budget Chicago theater.” Without exception, I have found the work to be by turns entertaining, meaningful, boisterous and intelligent.

I suppose the streak had to end, and indeed it has with Remy Bummpo’s final production of its 18th season, “Travesties.” Directed by the company’s Producing Artistic Director Nick Sandys, this confused and rambling construction’s deficiencies are rooted in the source material.

In the production’s press pieces, Sandys describes “Travesties” as such: “Stoppard out-Wildes Wilde, out-Joyces Joyce and builds a surrealist comedy from the wreckage… You may want to familiarize yourself with ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ If you enjoy that play, you’ll enjoy this one.”

This critic begs to differ. For while I delight in the celebration of absurdity, the ironic superficiality and the lampoon of late 19th Century drawing room manners that is “Earnest,” my companion for the evening and I found “Travesties” to be the navel gazing work of a playwright in love with his own intellectualism. It’s a wink-wink, nod to the post-modern cultural elite, without the self-awareness that makes Wilde’s accessible language play so universally appealing.

From Sandys’ fundamental misread of the similarities between Stoppard and Wilde, it stands to reason that further misunderstandings fall across the Greenhouse Theater Center upstairs stage like so many dominoes. The press release observes, “Sandys believes that the everyman, in this case a British civil servant named Henry Carr, is where audiences will most see themselves in this play.”

Apparently Sandys is counting on audiences to be comprised of upper middle class, senile dandys with a penchant for stretching the truth. Because I know I couldn’t relate to the story of WWI-era intellectual expatriates flopping around Switzerland arguing, and I didn’t want to. In fact, though I heard other critics exiting the theater breathlessly wondering at the production’s “brilliance,” I challenge them to tell me what happened during the first 15 minutes of the performance. Because for all my education, admiration of Wilde and love of absurdist work, I can’t say. If I haven’t been clear, this is a major flaw smacking of the alienating modernist aesthetics of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, rather than Oscar Wilde.

The plot, such as can be followed, goes like this: “Toss together James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Dadist poet Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917… throw in limericks and lyrics and ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ then shred the whole mélange through the mind of an aging British civil servant.”

There are too many ideas here, and despite the really fine work of the talented cast combined with terrific Scenic Design by Joe Schermoly, the overstuffing is obvious and disorienting. Greg Matthew Anderson (Tzara) with his chiseled features, mastery of European accents and deft comedic timing, continues to be one the most delightful performers on the Chicago theater scene. He deserves higher quality material.

I’m sorry but I really can’t let Sandys off the hook here. As an Artistic Director, he has put his stamp of approval on so many wonderful Remy Bumppo offerings. I’ve also enjoyed him as a stage performer in work such as late December 2013’s “An Inspector Calls.” I am a genuine admirer and thus feel both bound and disappointed to pronounce “Travesties,” …well a travesty. It’s a haughty DOA stinker. Remy Bummpo is much better than this. I look forward to a 19th season redemption next fall.

Since its debut in 2010, the Steppenwolf Theatre Garage Rep series has offered a high profile platform for storefront theater companies to introduce themselves to new audiences. This is one of the many features to admire about the vaunted Chicago cultural institution that is Steppenwolf. It uses its considerable clout to lift other worthwhile voices in the Windy City community that may not otherwise be heard. There are usually hits and misses, but it’s such a wonderful democratic celebration of our town’s theatric diversity.

As part of the 2015 Garage series, Pride Films and Plays presents “Angry Fags,” a stunner of a work by Topher Payne. Directed by Derek Van Barham, this powder keg of a production is a conflict of emotions that hurts in all the right ways. It’s laugh out loud funny, horribly cynical, infuriated, hopeful and full of love. Yes — all of that. Audience members will be uncomfortable, elated, amused and saddened in almost perfectly balanced amounts. Strap in people. It’s a ride worth taking.

In this story of postmodern vigilanteism in Atlanta, best friends and roommates Cooper (James Nedrud) and Bennett (Kevin Webb), according to press materials, “feel helpless and frightened when one of their friends is the victim of an assault at a local bar. Then they feel something new: pure, unfiltered rage.”

Okay, but let’s back up for a second. Before things turn serious, the production begins as a piece of performance art requiring audience participation. A flawless lounge-style singer warms up the crowd with classic standards, and modern tunes with a crooner slant. Even if one doesn’t have time or interest in the play, the price of a ticket is worthwhile just to hear this gentleman perform “Georgia on My Mind.” Seriously. It’s amazingly smooth. When the set concludes, the actual play begins with Senator Allison Haines (Kelli Walker) working the room, shaking attendee hands to welcome them to the venue. And then we’re off, already fully invested.

Bennett is the speechwriter for Senator Haines, the only uncloseted lesbian elected official (emphasis on uncloseted) in the state. Bennett is also smarting from a recent breakup with longtime love Sammy, another Haines campaign volunteer. When a never-seen Sammy becomes the victim of a hate crime, Haines’s self-interested, cautious public response sends Bennett and his Boy Friday Cooper on an empowered quest to destroy the hypocritical, hateful forces that threaten “the tribe.” Bennett and Cooper even develop a slogan. In their minds, “It Gets Better” is too weak, too dependent. Instead they argue, a kinder, safer world is the product of those brave enough to “Make It Better.”

Here’s the thing. Bennett and Cooper do terrible things for noble reasons. Wrongheaded, illegal and dangerous as they are, they’re not at all unlikeable. Quite the contrary. They are loyal, loving, outrageously funny and smart humans who are tired of society’s view of gay men as weak and ineffectual, ripe for bullying and terrorism.

Senator Haines is drawn equally complex. She frames her moral challenges honestly in a scene where she laments the loss of her activism in an effort to retain a job that “pays $17,000 a year,” requires her to wear heels and consistently beg every four years for the privilege. Even Bennett’s new lover Adam, an ambitious Haines strategist from a pistachio farm in California who proves himself to be more predator than bumpkin, is comprehensible. No character’s motivation comes from a place of absurdity.

A whip-smart, relevant and incendiary script from Payne is complemented by savvy media work from Scenic and Media Director G Max Maxin IV and Videographer Alex Thompson. The team integrates the loud, colorful, harassing 24/7 news cycle into the production’s political themes, turning it into an important virtual character. This character is nearly as compelling as the human ones who traverse the stage, inhabited by a group of actors whose compelling, nuanced acting is to be uniformly celebrated.

It’s hard to distill the complicated and worthy Pride Film and Plays’ staging of “Angry Fags” at the Steppenwolf Garage Rep 2015 into an accessible soundbite. But perhaps the company itself gets closest in writing, “[It’s] an Oscar Wilde-meets-Tarantino fever dream about how good ideas go bad, with fascinating forays into American politics, bomb building and pistachios.” If that description doesn’t grab you, how about the promise of layered “ALF” jokes?”

See it.