They did the mash. They did the monster mash. Or more accurately, the monster mash-up. In The Monster-Builder, Amy Freed's play at the Aurora Theatre, you may detect influences from Ibsen to Dracula, Mel Brooks to Albert Speer, Marx Brothers to The Phantom of the Opera, and Faust to Frankenstein. It depends upon which minute of the play you're watching.
For most of those minutes, this theatrical hydra provides a heady stream of entertainment, losing its way only after Danny Scheie's character has been dispatched near the end. Scheie plays a world-renowned architect with a brutalist vision that is both alarming and hilarious. Highbrows, at least those who don't have to actually occupy his edifices, adore his work. His design for an Alzheimer's facility included a maze that patients must navigate to get back to their rooms, and he is presently at work on his masterpiece: the Abu Dhabi Tower of Justice and Interrogation.
Gregor Zubrowski lives in a trophy house filled with sharp angles that defies visitors to find a place to sit. His current trophy companion (a humorously spacey Sierra Jolene) invites a college friend (an appealing Tracy Hazas) and her husband (a testy Thomas Gorrebeeck), aspiring architects themselves, to meet the great Zubrowski. With authoritarian graciousness, he regales his guests with his impossibly opaque theories on architecture designed to "stand between people and their preferences." He's amused by young architect Dieter's socially conscious jabs, and he's taken with Dieter's comely spouse and design partner Rita in ways that go beyond convivial shoptalk.
Matters have only a suggestion of the ominous, and before they become more so, there is a diversion into another style of comedy �" perhaps it's a taste of Christopher Durang �" as Dieter and Rita try to land a remodeling job with a moneyed socialite (a merrily flaky Nancy Carlin) and her rags-to-riches husband (a gruffly comic Rod Gnapp). The idealistic designers need the job, but also want to apply their talents toward the civic good. They think they have found this project in restoring an old boathouse into a kind of community center, and all is going swimmingly until Gregor jealously snatches the project away.
As the play progresses, Gregor's evil core increasingly reveals itself and draws Rita under his spell. There then come some slapstick, inside-y architect jokes, murder, zany banter, and increasing suggestions that Gregor is not only a fascist but also one who had face time the Fuehrer himself. While Freed's stylistic zigs and zags are usually humorous within themselves, and Art Manke's direction is in tune with that, Scheie's performance provides the needed glue. As Gregor, Scheie channels his outlandish comic instincts into a more tightly wound container. But absurdity can only be held at bay to a point, as the playwright and the performer gleefully lessen the restraints.
But there needs to be a payoff if shackles on even a quasi-reality are loosened, and here the play begins its stumble to the final curtain. A supernatural buildup fizzles with a weak reveal, and the purpose of a champagne-and-confetti last scene is unclear and certainly sends a mixed message of seemingly inadvertent ambiguity. As in, if there are any good guys, which ones are they? It seems to be a celebration of mediocrity and bad taste, which might be ironic, if the alternative weren't a sadistic Nazi vampire.
The Monster-Builder will run at Aurora Theatre, extended through Dec. 20. Tickets are $32-$50. Call (510) 843-4822 or go the auroratheatre.org.