As bizarre scenes go, it’s hard to top the one in “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” where a character gets a paw job from a fluffy white cat.
That seduction is described in graphic, gleeful detail by the recipient, the show’s star and writer, Wallace Shawn — better known in some quarters as the master criminal Vizzini in “The Princess Bride.”
Fans of that film who find their way to this show are in for a shock: Shawn’s Ben may meet his feline lover in a magical castle, but the fairy tale has a Freudian flavor and a pornographic frankness.
And it goes on for close to 3 ¹/₂ hours. This would tax the patience of the most dedicated admirer of interspecies romance.
You could say that Ben, a scientist, is living the dream and the nightmare all at once. He invented a nutrient called Grain No. 1 that made animals feed on each other, and solved world hunger. How the first led to the second makes no sense, but that’s just one of the leaps the show makes you take.
The discovery made Ben rich, but Grain No. 1 spread out of control and messed up the entire world by “unlocking some sort of molecular inhibition” in animals and humans.
Message received: Humanity engineers its own destruction.
Ben himself tried some of the compound, which likely made him sexually ravenous. Our inventor engages in a passionate affair with the comely Robin — the sly Jennifer Tilly, looking as if her cleavage may explode out of her low-cut dress any second.
We know less about Ben’s wife, Cerise (Julie Hagerty), who drifts in and out like a gentle, white-clad ghost, and seems to be Ben’s conscience.
But the one thing our narrator is obsessed about isn’t Robin, Cerise or even his true soulmate, Blanche the cat.
“My d - - k is my friend,” he says. “Actually, my d - - k is my best friend, and in a certain way, it’s my only friend.”
And here we go, three hours’ worth of navel-gazing — or rather “member”-gazing, since Ben/Shawn keeps using that quaint expression, familiar to readers of Victorian erotica and contemporary fanfic alike.
Directed by André Gregory — Shawn’s tablemate in the movie “My Dinner with André” — the production makes stylish use of Bill Morrison’s haunting projections.
The surreal interplay of fairy tale and apocalyptic smut can be fascinating, and there are flashes of dark wit. When Ben wakes up after hot sex with Robin, he describes his discarded underwear looking “like a disordered room where a party had been held, the champagne and confetti not yet cleared away.”
But as in Shawn’s 1996 piece “The Designated Mourner,” the show often seems like the self-indulgent death rattle of certain New York intellectuals. Based on this play, it’s not sure anybody will miss them.