Friday night at 12th Ave Arts, Washington Ensemble Theatre will present the world premier of Susan Soon He Stanton’s The Things Are Against Us, a surreal comedy/horror/romance about two sisters trying find each other and, in a larger way, a sense of home.

The problem: the home is haunted. The other problem: the sisters’ romantic entanglements with men extend across at least three time periods and different planes of existence, and all of that ends up slowing down and derailing the familial reunion.

Characters include the two sisters—Solange, a New York hipster who's been unlucky in love, and Tessa, a self-described "spinster" living in a haunted bed and breakfast in rural Massachusetts. Tessa sorta lives with a lumberjack-type named Caspar, who constructs erotic bathtubs and chops a lot of wood. Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca figures heavily, as does Yusef, a Lebanese man who believes his life is fated by the writings of his grandfather.

When I saw The Mother Fucker With the Hat at WET earlier in the year, I briefly wondered whether the company was looking to produce more straightforward work. Reading Stanton's play quickly disabused me of that wonder.

“It’s not that [The Things Are Against Us] makes no sense, it's that it makes all the sense,” said Samie Spring Detzer. “David Lynch is someone we thought about a lot," she added.

We were sitting in a Starbucks (shut up! it's hard to find a place to meet downtown!) with a jet-lagged Stanton, talking about what audiences can expect from the show.

Based on the script, Detzer's take seemed astute to me. In the wash of Stanton's lyrical language and unsettling imagery, the play only makes sense, in that it's primarily interested in pricking your sensorium. Liberating yourself from the expectation of linear storytelling will grant you access to unexpected moments of poignancy and humor, all of which are ample in the script.

And it's not like nobody's done anything like this before. The script owes an aesthetic debt to Eugène Ionesco and a formal debt to Bram Stoker's Dracula (the first half of the play is told almost entirely through letters and journal entries), both of which Stanton hastens to acknowledge.

As with all plays that employ surreal gestures, this one has a logic of its own. At the time Stanton wrote the play, she was transitioning from her 20s into her 30s, and she was also about to leave grad school. “I was feeling a lot of nameless dread and anxiety," she said. "There was a lot of festering, smoldering stagnation and then sudden change.” I can think of no better way to describe the logic driving this piece. Life moves along like that—slow periods followed by a great lurching forward—so a sort of punctuated equilibrium form seems fitting for drama.

Stanton says she wrote the play in her last year of grad school at Yale, where she studied under Paula Vogel. Vogel gave Stanton a "bake off" assignment. The task was to write a play in 48 hours drawing from a list of "ingredients." Some of Stanton's ingredients included French Absurdism, Edward Bond, Lizzie Borden, and "a dinner before an atrocity."

At the time of the play's composition, Stanton was staying with her father, the poet Joseph Stanton, in what she claims was "an incredibly haunted sea captain's mansion" on Cape Cod, which was located across from the estate of the illustrator of darkness, Edward Gorey, whom her father happened to be researching at the time.

The Things Are Against Us is full of all of those influences. Smiling a little, Stanton said she wrote the play in a fugue state: "It's by far my most wild, unproduceable play."

Producing wild and unproduceable plays is WET's wheelhouse. Also in WET's wheelhouse is giving a full production to a Yale graduate who wrote a play in 48 hours as an exercise for a Paula Vogel class. See for reference: WET's production of Kim Rosenstock’s 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan, which ran back in September.

In this case, Detzer said Michael Place—a Yale grad school grad and a founder of the company—mentioned Stanton as a playwright who had a reputation for writing "trippy, female-driven stories," which interested Detzer. The other thing that drew the company to the script was that it was "unfinished." They liked that they'd be part of making the piece.

Over the course of the year that they've been developing the show, there's been two workshops of the script and a lot of attention paid to the work of manifesting the play's spooktacular magic. WET's production will include motion-capture technology to create some of the effects, and there will be a number of lightly immersive elements—the first row of seats will be Victorian-style chairs, for instance—to blur the distinction between the cast and the audience.