Messy and complex are not synonymous as is proved in Mike, a muddled “play with music” in which four characters share a dinner none of them will want to remember. Daniel (played by a lanky, charming Leo Defriend) is obsessed with a phone app which helps users create custom characters, meanwhile his wife Cynthia (Giulia Martinelli) is preparing to have her younger sister Fanny (Vanessa Rose) come over with her no-gooder boyfriend Abe (Gore Abrams) who shares a secret with Daniel. And no, it’s not that kind of secret.

Instead audience members are subjected to a parade of nonsensical speeches that mention headless chickens, the superficiality of showbusiness and blood ties. Written and directed by Alexandra Zelman-Doring, Mike is a play that often thinks it’s smarter than it actually is, which makes its forced humor and relentless need to shock as grating as sitting through a three hour piano recital consisting only of “Chopsticks”. We see the characters change their clothes, use a toilet as a desk/confessional/vomitorium and by the time we have to sit and watch the four characters tear apart a roast chicken using their bare hands, the play has long left the realm of performance art and entered vulgarity.

This is a shame because the ensemble is actually quite committed to this insanity, with Abrams delivering his speeches not only without the affectations the words inspire, but actually as if he means them, and mostly because the songs at the center of the play are actually rather good. Delivered with sincere gusto by Jodi Ferguson (who wrote the music to Zelamn-Doring’s lyrics) the songs become much needed beauty breaks in a play whose kind of ugly is truly skin deep.