This wild piece of Japanese absurdism offers diminishing returns. The story is about Karuta, a living girl in a family of dead people. She falls in love with a living thief named Kitaro, but her folks don’t like this kind of mixed marriage so they set her up with a good-looking dead boy. At first, the wild mashups sustain interest—the fishnet stockings under the traditional robes, the Broadway-style tunes sung in Japanese—but, with some exceptions, the show is so loudly aggressive that, after a while, everything starts to look the same, and it’s hard to care about its self-consciously philosophical questions.

At Performance Works on September 6 (8 p.m.), 7 (6:30 p.m.), and 9 (10:10 p.m.)