Created by Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia. Presented by QuipTake. At the Vancity Culture Lab on Wednesday, May 27 as part of the rEvolver Festival. Continues until May 30

Mostly, you’ve got to love The Art of Building a Bunker. But there’s a major chunk of it that makes no sense. Taking in this show is like listening to a super-stimulating friend who keeps gapping out on you.

Solo actor Adam Lazarus plays a bunch of characters. The main guy is Elvis, whose boss has forced him to take sensitivity training. Cam, the leader, speaks the jargon of personal growth and political progressiveness: “Each of you is a sturdy canoe, such as built by the First People who are our teachers and whose land you stand on today. Megawich.” Cam can’t move without saying “Namaste”, and when asked to describe himself in three words, he responds, “Today I am: learning, expandingness, and flower remedies.”

Cam is also a corporate shill, an embodiment of the myriad new ways in which our spiritual and emotional lives are being monetized: “CEOs want to dervish dance.”

This satire is sharp and welcome. And the show is at its edgiest in its exploration of what we are and are not allowed to say these days. On the one hand, there’s John, the South African guy, who makes disgustingly demeaning sexist jokes and feels perfectly entitled to do so. On the other, there’s Cam, whose self-righteousness brooks no opposition.

When a participant named Peter challenges Cam’s sense of First Nations history, Cam spits back, “Have you done the Two Totems workshop? Weekend shamanic retreats? Have you?” Socially, we’re in self-satisfied silos these days, and The Art of Building a Bunker gleefully takes a sledgehammer to them.

Even in its own tropes, the show pushes edges. Because she has trouble pronouncing her own name, almost everybody in the workshop calls Laura, an Asian woman, Raura. Shy and mumbling, Laura is a stereotype. As embodied by Lazarus with unapologetic exaggeration, she’s also funny, because she’s recognizable: laughter becomes a transgressive release. And it’s uncomfortable: the night I attended, a friend was in the audience with his female Asian partner. Was my laughter hurting her? You’ve got to appreciate a show that produces such complex responses. And, for the record, when she breaks through her shell, Laura reveals her humanity in a moving—and eccentric—tirade.

Lazarus, who wrote The Art of Building a Bunker with his director, Guillermo Verdecchia, is a phenomenal performer, especially physically. His body jumps crisply from one character to another, he throws himself into extremes—as when Elvis transforms, momentarily, into a rock ’n’ roll god—and he creates fantastic bits of physical business, including a sequence in which Elvis endlessly tugs at his papers when preparing to give a speech.

So what’s wrong with The Art of Building a Bunker? Well, the script attempts to understand Elvis, and that understanding doesn’t ring true. Elvis is xenophobic: he yells at a Portuguese woman on the subway, for instance, partly because she’s Portuguese. He also expresses deep fears about a range of issues including climate change, ISIL, and the economic rise of China. But the connection between Elvis’s multiple fears and his anger feels theoretical rather than accurate or deeply understood. Yes, there’s a lot of weird shit going down these days, but why does that weird shit make Elvis pick on the Portuguese woman? Where is the beating heart of Elvis’s racism—if that’s what we’re really looking at? He says he feels powerless, but how? Are his concerns primarily economic? It’s not clear.

On this level, The Art of Building a Bunker is a bit of a mess, and, at 90 minutes, the show feels like it could easily lose 10. But, in a way, the script’s lack of tidiness is one of its greatest charms. Its politics and its sensibilities aren’t freeze-dried. Thank God.