Yay! I didn’t get all of it! You’ve got to love a stretch.

In Fringe fave Martin Dockery’s structurally dense and conceptually rich monologue, he visits the exclusion zone that’s been created around the site of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. There, he finds the book Zona, in which writer Geoff Dyer responds to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. In that Russian movie, a small group visits an exclusion zone very much like Chernobyl’s—even though Tarkovsky made Stalker seven years before the explosion.

And the layering doesn’t stop there. Dockery goes to Chernobyl in search of storytelling inspiration, Dyer’s book is about the ways art alters perception, and the movie uses the act of filmmaking to explore the existential crisis. So it’s all about the human impulse to create, to conjure meaning out of nothing. Yes, it’s a massive, delicious head-twist.

Fortunately, Dockery is too down-to-earth funny to let things get pretentious: “The feeling of despair is like a condiment that has been spread on this film.” He crafts beautiful phrases, describing the radiation leak as “a geyser of invisible fire”. And his body is so animated he’s like a living cartoon.

At the Waterfront Theatre on September 10 (7:45 p.m.), 12 (1 p.m.), 13 (9:35 p.m.), 17 (6:45 p.m.), 19 (5:40 p.m.), and 20 (3:15 p.m.)