Sound familiar? Well, it could be the Taliban or Al Queda, or our own homegrown maniacs. What also fits this description is The Bacchae, Euripides' 2,500 year-old play about the revenge of Dionysus, god of wine, sex, revelry, and, yes theater, which is capping off the current season at the Yale Summer Cabaret.

What makes this energetic production, which runs through Aug. 11th, so appealing is that it tells this grisly and timeless theme through original rockabilly songs, impressive acrobatics, Marx Brothers gender-bending slapstick, and buckets of honey and wine, drunk, poured, and bathed in.

After our charming Chorus Leader, Luke Robertson (pictured above), has adjusted his bra strap and rummaged through his shopping cart, full of wine bottles and vines of muscatel, he fills us in on the latest from Thebes: Dionysus has returned in the form of a mandolin-playing foreigner and he is angry his hometown has never worshipped him as a god. When Pentheus, the king, jails the god in order to undermine the growing waves of females carousing about town, his regal goose is cooked. But because it's a Greek play, where heroes' flaws dictate their destiny, his curiosity gets the better of him. He agrees to check out the revelry disguised in a dress. For it's a female phenomenon; if the women see a man among them, especially a skeptic, watch out.

In this scene, after Pentheus (Eric Bryant) has made the foolish move, which is his point of no return in the play, Dionysus, aka Barret O'Brien, initiates him by pouring buckets of shiraz and honey all over the king's disguise -- that is, his wedding dress. He goes out into the fields to observe the hysteria. The man, non-believer, and mocker of their rites that he is, then endures a painful dismemberment at the hands of the bacchants that makes being burned and then strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates seem almost merciful.

As told by a messenger back from the scene of the carnage, Pentheus is catapulted to the top of a fir tree, the women attack the tree, knock it down, and rip the king to shreds. "They tore off a foot still warm in its shoe" the messenger says, "the flesh is ripped from his ribs. They play ball with parts of his body, no two parts of him were left in the same place in the forest." Then, finally, Pentheus' own mother Agave, the captive of the cult, takes her son's head without knowing who or what it is and sticks it on her wand.

The Chorus Leader says, in a coda, after this description, that "this exultation in disaster is not right," and there are occasional lines about the importance of humility, and purity, and obeying the gods, the choral point of view -- which is supposed to be audience's in most Greek plays -- is too little and too late. In fact, what's remarkable about the play is that there is almost no voice of reason anywhere to be found, except for Pentheus'. And his opposition is far from noble, less the rational pitting itself on our behalfs against the irrational, but rather a self-interested king worried a new cult is coming to grab a piece of the Theban sacrifice and augury business.

Even Teresa Lin's old seer Teiresias (pictured), which she pitches somewhere between St. Nick with a Russian accent and the Blues Brothers, is taken in by the hysteria. In the opening scense he and Cadmus, Pentheus's grandfather, instead of being deliberate and issuing minatory advice, just go off to join in, vain codgers willing to don the skin of a fawn and brandish the cult emblem, the thrysus, that is a wand wrapped in ivy, just to show they're not too ancient to have a cool new experience.

Doesn't anybody in this town recognize the danger? It's hard to know what Euripides really is after us to think on here. But the lure and triumph of the irrational are in full swing, and poor mortals don't seem to have any place to turn in Thebes. He apparently wrote this play toward the end of his life in a rural retreat, where he had gone to escape the seemingly endless wars, with the Persians and then the Spartans, which had kept the Athenians in a martial swoon for generations.

So swoon, thrall, and the power of emotion and instinct to carry away whole populations are barely relieved in the play. What also pulses through it, of course, is sex, and the violence that appears to be its kissing cousin. This may have something to do with the fascinating back story, one of the weirdest in the annals of the very weird celebrity gods of Parnassus: The source of Dionysus' anger is that when his mom Semele (the dancer who initiates the play) got pregnant with him by Zeus, the king's jealous wife Hera induces poor Semele to implore Zeus, who always disguises himself when he slums among mortals, to reveal his brilliant self.

When he does this, the fire of his godliness incinerates her. Doesn't he by now know what's going to happen! Zeus snatches the still unborn Dionysus from Semele's frying womb, and showing his maternal side and presumably continuing his very bad relationship with Hera, the king sews the future god of wine and sex neatly up on his own godly thigh, from which location, after a short gestation on Mt. Olympus, Zeus gives birth to his own son. It's no wonder Dionysus is screwed up, and violently so. (In the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, there's a beautiful Renaissance drawing, from around 1540, by Luca Penni, titled Jupiter and Semele, on this subject, which will be on view in a master drawings exhibition beginning in February.)

In the end of Euripides' sad tale of the deadly power of illusion and crowds, when Pentheus's mom Agave recognizes what she's wrought, she and Cadmus are exiled, accompanied by snakes, and sent away from their homes forever for their crimes. Is this conclusion reassuring or even more unnerving? Dionysus has his revenge. One wants to stand up and cheer, like an adolescent, "Yeah, Gods Rule!" Yet at play's end the city appears to remain possessed, that is, destroyed, because Bacchus wasn't worshipped, even though that very worship was arguably as destructive.

Greek theology? Go figger. It's no wonder the play's director Mike Donahue and co-producers Roberta Pereira and Stephanie Ybarra opted to mix the cross-dressing carnage with eight original songs, including a charmer towards the end, "The Gods Are Crafty," which, with its edgy Sweeny Todd tonalities, strikes just the right balance between tragedy and farce, as does The Bacchae as a whole.

In the spirit of Athenian democracy and its Internet descendents, the play was selected via an online vote to cap the season, said Pereira. More than 200 subscribers to the Summer Cabaret and friends preferred it over King Lear and Ibsen's Peer Gynt (good choice for a humid summer night). The Dionysiac voters also weighed in on their choices for performance space: after an introduction and original dance in a small pile of dirt by Semele (Rebecca Alaly), that is, Dionysus' dead mom, in the caberet's downstairs, the action, along with audience, shifts outside to the adjacent garden.

There, climbing up and down ladders, over fences, and fire escapes, the actors cover themselves with sweat, water, honey, and wine (the write-in audience got the vote for the fluids too), and the balance of the play unfolds. Getting the right balance of burlesque, Charles Ludlum dress-up pleasures, and the high tragic speeches of The Bacchae sometimes feels a little bumpy, but the road to and from Thebes is never dull. For tickets for remaining performances, call 432.1567 or click here.

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