John Guare’s streak of playful absurdism makes even his lesser works enjoyable to watch unfold onstage. That’s the case with his latest, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, whose breezy title—a whaling phrase describing the wild ride a harpooned whale could dangerously take those hunting it down on—winks at its protagonist’s own journey. Edmund “Mundie” Gowery is a successful—read: ruthless—Wall Street trader who authored a single hit play, Internal Structure of Stars, some four decades ago: when we meet him, he’s giddy that he’s become a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. (57 Across: 1970s playwright. 6 Letters.) When two zombie-like adults, Poe and Lilac, enter his office, his memories of a long-ago summer flood back and we enter his past; or, at least, how he supposedly remembers it.

Gowery’s summer of ‘75 concerns a home in Nantucket his lawyer talks him into buying with the proceeds from his play: the police call with the news that his tenants are part of a child pornography ring and that he may be implicated since he’s the owner. Dropping everything in New York, he arrives in Nantucket and meets a whole cast of characters: 9-year-old Poe and his 7-year-old sister Lilac; their father, Schuyler; their mother’s (supposed) lover, McPhee; and a Nantucket police officer. The children’s mother and Schyuler’s wife, Elsie, is the catalyst for the entire plot: she staged a production of Mundie’s play and, when she called to let him know that, he nastily denigrated what he considered its amateurishness. Mundie believes that she may have designed an elaborate revenge scheme against him revolving around his shady tenants.

Guare delights in such farcical plotting, which variously includes Magritte, vengeance, adultery, suicide, pedophilia (Roman Polanski is mentioned in a subplot about Mundie’s next possible project) and possible murder; there are even pop-up appearances by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Walt Disney himself (!), as well as references to Jaws, both book and movie, which ruled that summer’s beach reading and box office. How does it all fit together? Guare really never answers that question, but his breathless journey through Mundie’s (and his own?) possible past is often exhilarating, at times reminiscent of the sleight-of-hand that distinguishes his best work, i.e., The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, A Few Stout Individuals and Landscape of the Body.

A huge assist comes from Jerry Zaks, whose dizzyingly precise direction is always on Guare’s offbeat wavelength, sorting out the strangely compelling story strands and characters and sending them on their merry way. Paul Gallo’s arresting two-tiered set adroitly visualizes the fragmented states of Mundie’s memory, while the estimable supporting cast is led by Will Swenson’s amped-up McPhee, German Jaramillo’s amusingly deadpan Borges, and Clea Alsip and Tina Benko’s hilarious turns as women in Mundie’s messy life.

Standing front and center, John Laroquette plays Mundie with an infectious enthusiasm as he makes every utterance and inflection, however slight, drip with caustic meaning. A peerless guide frantically leading us through Mundie’s mind, Laroquette even gives Guare’s final bit of dialogue about self-recognition a weariness that’s quite touching, an unexpectedly emotional capstone to a bizarre but buoyant trip down memory lane.