Fuddy Meers tackles some serious issues, domestic violence chief among them. But at its core, this first play from Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire is a wacky, off-the-wall comedy that introduces us to the mother of all dysfunctional families.

And for audiences at Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre, where Fuddy Meers is enjoying a first-rate run under the capable direction of Ed Shea, it’s providing a wild ride.

True, the play requires something of a stretch from viewers. Lindsay-Abaire’s bizarre characters tend to be pushed to extremes, to find themselves in unbelievable situations suffering from rare and exotic afflictions.

But Fuddy Meers is also hilarious, an ingenious bit of writing that will keep you guessing at every turn. It’s a telling play that says something about the best and worst of families.

In a way, Fuddy Meers is a mystery, as much a puzzle as the search-a-word games that the main character, Claire, is fond of playing. Claire, it turns out, suffers from a rare form of amnesia that causes her to awake each morning as a blank slate. She spends her days piecing together her life with the help of a primer prepared by her husband, Richard, only to forget all she has discovered once she falls asleep.

As she struggles to bring meaning and order to her life, she encounters a host of screwball characters who only add to the confusion. Not long after we meet her, Claire is visited by a lame man with a pronounced lisp, who is half-blind and deaf in one, deformed ear.

He claims to be her brother and says she must flee Richard, who he says is dangerous and plotting to kill her. Claire and Limping Man, who calls himself Zach, make their way to the home of Claire’s mother, Gertie, who has suffered a stroke that has left her speech garbled and all but incomprehensible.

Soon, an escaped convict named Millet shows up with his foul-mouthed puppet. Not long after that Richard arrives with Claire’s pot-smoking son Kenny, along with a female cop the two have kidnapped along the way. Or is she a cop?

All this makes for moments of total craziness, a chaotic scene that culminates in a crescendo that results in stabbings, a shooting and the audience left trying to piece together the nutty goings-on. It is only in the second act that the craziness unravels and we learn how these misfits are connected, and what kind of damage they have inflicted upon one another.

If you are wondering, the “fuddy meers” of the title is stroke talk for “funny mirrors,” as in the kind in the carnival fun house where Claire suffered her first bout of amnesia. It’s also a rather obvious metaphor for lives seen through such a distorted lens.

In some ways, Gertie, the woman who has trouble speaking, is the most lucid of the lot. She’s played by Paula Faber, who does a terrific job of letting us know what’s on her mind, even though it’s almost impossible to make out what she’s saying. Faber, in one of her best roles, wrestles with broken and twisted language, using inflections and gestures to get her point across.

At first, it’s a little hard to penetrate her words. But as the play unfolds, they make more and more sense.

The whole cast is strong, especially an intense F. William Oakes as the wild-eyed Limping Man. Oakes is absolutely on fire in this production, right out there on the edge.

Barbara McElroy did a great job capturing the child-like innocence of Claire, who greets each day afresh without the baggage of memory and regret. Every moment for McElroy seems free from angst and open to possibilities.

Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, about a couple grieving the loss of their young child, wrote Fuddy Meers in his late 20s while studying at Juilliard with Christopher Durang. And if he learned anything from Durang, it’s that sad people can be funny, that absurd situations can ring true.

Who but the most skilled wordsmith could concoct an uproarious comedy about a stroke victim and an amnesiac? But Lindsay-Abaire succeeds, without seeming cruel or callous. There is, in fact, a wonderfully touching moment when Gertie, in one of her more intelligible utterances, says how she wished she had said more when she had a chance.

Trevor Elliot has come up with the attractive revolving set for the show, one that switches from Claire’s stark bedroom with blue sky and puffy clouds, to Gertie’s 1950s kitchen, her musty basement and the front seat of Richard’s car.

Rounding out the cast are Wayne Kneeland, who is excellent as patient husband Richard, a man with demons of his own, and Christopher O’Brien as the difficult teen Kenny. Jonathan Jacobs manages to bounce with ease from mild-mannered convict Millet to his mean-spirited puppet alter-ego.

Amy Thompson was fine as Heidi, the inept cop.

Again, Fuddy Meers is a little over-the-top, a play that requires some suspension of disbelief. But it contains some brilliant writing, and is about as quirky a night of theater as you’re likely to encounter. And at 2nd Story, it’s enjoying a tight, fast-paced production.

Family dysfunction alone is cause for fodder, but when you throw in an amnesiac, a stroke victim and domestic violence, the possibilities are endless and darkly comic. David Lindsay-Abaire’s play, Fuddy Meers, now playing at 2nd Story Theatre, features a cast of characters and storyline on par with Fellini and Lynch. Yet while the works of those directors were deliberately meant to shock or provoke thought, Lindsay-Abaire simply wants the audience to laugh -- and thanks to 2nd Story’s superb acting ensemble, the result is entertaining and hilarious.

At the center of this bizarre story and its cluster of misfits is Claire (Barbara McElroy), a seemingly unfazed wife and mother who suffers from a type of amnesia that completely erases her memory on a day to day basis. Her husband, Richard (Wayne Kneeland), has become so accustomed to reintroducing himself to Claire each morning when she awakes, that he keeps a scrapbook collection of clues and photos that will familiarize his wife with the places and people in her life, including their rebellious teenage son, Kenny. After Richard shares a few unkind words with Kenny (Christopher O’Brien), kisses Claire good-bye and sets off for the day, all seems relatively sane for this family unit.

Claire’s serenity is short-lived when a limping man in a ski mask bursts into her bedroom claiming to be her brother Zack (F. William Oakes) who has come to rescue her from the allegedly dangerous Richard. The siblings drive off to see their mother, Gertie (Paula Faber), who recently suffered a stroke that left her speech mostly incomprehensible. Claire in turn makes the acquaintance of Millett (Jonathan Jacobs), a supposed friend of Zack’s who carries on lewd conversations with his hand puppet. As Claire slowly starts to piece together her predicament, Richard and Kenny set out to find her, only to be pulled over by a brawny female transit officer (Amy Thompson); once they decide to take her hostage, the real fun begins.

The story is as surreal as the characters are ridiculous, which makes the entire production irresistible. Paula Faber has never been better, and more challenged, in a role that requires sensitivity, discipline, and essentially having to learn an entire new language. Even under the most politically incorrect circumstances, she still succeeds at making us laugh. F. William Oakes is a frightening delight as the ghoulish impostor who tries to seize Claire’s ailment as an opportunity. Jonathan Jacobs is an absolute hoot as the brainless and slighted sidekick who has yet to learn to think for himself. Wayne Kneeland plays Richard with a stoic brilliance that is both funny and disarming, and Christopher O’Brien as Kenny exemplifies angst and innocence.

For those who can appreciate occasionally offensive, wonderfully absurd, unconventional theater, Fuddy Meers invites you to take a peak through its looking glass.

You know how it is. Some days it’s like you’ve learned nothing at all, as though you’re starting all over again, a Groundhog Day without the benefit of hindsight. David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers, at 2nd Story Theatre through June 8, may inflict vexing déjà vu of such mornings, but it’s also a very funny reminder that laughter can make such absurdity almost worthwhile.

Claire (Barbara McElroy) suffers from a psychogenic amnesia that has her waking in bed each morning with no knowledge of who she is. As the story opens, her doting husband Richard (Wayne Kneeland) shows her a book he has prepared that details such matters as her name, the floor plan of the house, and photos of people in her life, such as their fumingly surly son, Kenny (Christopher O’Brien).

But things are being kept from her. Director Ed Shea has Kneeland do an exaggerated shock take for us when Claire observes that amnesia is usually caused by sudden physical or psychological trauma. We have a suspenseful little point of information to look forward to.

The title of the play is a garbled pronunciation of “funny mirrors,” those carnival funhouse features that distort what the naïve and ill-informed call “reality.” That’s what they’re called by Claire’s mother, Gertie (Paula Faber), whose stroke-induced aphasia causes her to spout phrases and occasionally whole sentences in jabberwocky.

The other people in Claire’s life are no less disoriented. That is, of course, their whole point in this snapshot metaphor of the way our days are continuous unfoldings and re-crumplings of the pictures of our surroundings and co-confused inmates.

She meets the first such person when Richard steps out of the bedroom. The frantic limping man wearing a ski mask (F. William Oakes) isn’t a burglar but her brother Zachery, he says, come to rescue her. He seems so sincere that she leaves with him.

We journey with Claire in her woebegone wonderland, encountering characters easily as weird as a hookah-smoking caterpillar. Her mother, with her malapropisms, verbal dyslexia, and speech im-pediment, could be shouting “Off with her head!” and we’d never know it. Faber makes sure we understand what we need to, but the playwright and Shea want us to be at least a little confused with Claire.

And then there’s Millet (Jonathan Jacobs), Zachery’s mild-mannered co-conspirator, who channels all his negative emotions and rage through a foul-mouthed sock puppet doggie named Hinkey-Dinkey. The last character we meet is Heidi (Amy Thompson), a highway cop who pulls over Claire’s husband and son when they are speeding amidst a cloud of pot smoke. Needless to say, she isn’t who she says she is, but what else is new?

In introducing Fuddy Meers before each show, artistic director Shea points out that Lindsay-Abaire’s absurdist sensibility is much like the playwright’s black comedy colleague Christopher Durang. But Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 drama Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, shows here that he’s better at the nuts-and-bolts construction of a play. Carefully withheld information and character revelations propel the story. While Fuddy doesn’t neatly tie up every loose end, those left dangling are mostly incidental and supplement the life lesson here, that we never really know for sure what (or who) we know, so we might as well just calm down and be amused.

Claire keeps getting back to that point, a wise and necessary choice by McElroy and Shea, and does so with bemused rather than distressed befuddlement. That makes this comedy less dark than it might be but its message easier to take. The other actors challenge this optimistic stance nicely. As Zachery (OK, his real name is Phil), Oakes makes him intensely earnest in wanting to help Claire, so we become eager to learn why. Playing the flip side of not being able to understand—not being able to communicate—Faber similarly pulls us in. Jacobs also does well in the crucial role of Zachery’s cohort, though Millet’s anger could have packed a wallop if he’d played it real.

At the end of the play, we see Claire at the end of her day. She’s a survivor once again, but once again doesn’t know if all she’s learned will carry over to the morning. Kind of like where we find our-selves every night, if we’re honest.