If you can find better acting anywhere else at this year’s Master Playwright Festival, I’ll kiss your shoe.

At Home Theatre Company’s production of August Strindberg’s Creditors, adapted by cast member John Bluethner, is as outstanding a piece of local independent theatre as you’ll see.

The means are vividly limited (and I thought the Ragpickers venue was cramped), but the craft onstage is so finely practiced, it’ll even make you ignore the painful chairs.

At a seaside retreat, Gustav (Bluethner) notes that artist Adolph (Andrew Cecon) seems to be a dying man. He has stopped painting, and indeed feels devoured by his writer wife Tekla (Susanna Portnoy).

Gustav’s question is: does Adolph still have his balls?

It turns out Tekla has a few things to say about this whole testosterone-pumping thing – and that’s the real subject of the play right there.

It’s not simply, as Virginia Woolf observed, that men need women to feel superior; it’s that men – both historically and today – are driven to control women, so they can feel like men.

Tekla says it herself: Adolph addresses her like he’s her personal property.

It’s not that she’s devouring him – he has it backwards, in fact. More precisely, he’s eating himself, and blaming her.

Gustav’s dialogue, when tweaking Adolph’s supposed weakness, is delicious: “For a woman, loving someone means taking from him,” he declares.

That’s just a warm-up to: “When the snake is full, she vomits up the bones.” Or, best of all: “Some atheist you are! Worshipping woman instead!”

Given the play is identified as a “tragicomedy,” it’s safe to assume Strindberg didn’t mean for all of this to necessarily be played with a straight face.

And the talented cast doesn’t.

Rather, they play it with a bit of a wink, with a sly consciousness of how especially overwrought the words often are.

If this was meant to play for (partial) laughs in its day, the values and pretensions expressed are only doubly funny now.

It’s just such a well-written, classically structured play. The entirety of the action unfolds in real time, and the staging enables some terrific irony.

Creditors is as good a reason as can be found to get out, recent temperature drop or not.

Edit: Susanna Portnoy’s name was initially misspelled in this article. It’s also misspelled in the print edition of the paper. The Uniter regrets the error.

Published in Volume 65, Number 18 of The Uniter (February 3, 2011)