If Lucifer ever penned a play, it probably would be very like A Devil Inside, at Gremlin Theatre. It'd be hard to find a darker, more fiendishly funny production.

David Lindsay-Abaire's script is so demented he must work from an asylum, and director Matt Sciple has shaped the madness into something that glows in an attractively disturbing way.

The play begins when Mrs. Slater celebrates her son's 21st birthday by telling him his father was murdered many years earlier (in a grotesque and bizarre manner). She wants son Gene to find his father's killer and avenge the death "now that he's a man." Karen Wiese-Thompson makes Slater so loud and matter-of-fact about various insanities that it's plausible she might give her son some human feet pickled in a jar of formaldehyde as a birthday gift.

The pickled feet are a motivator and clue. Feet figure prominently throughout the play. More than one character is missing a foot, and Lily, played convincingly by Tina Frederickson, is a close-mouthed artist obsessed with drawing and sculpting feet.

The play is a puzzle of misdirected clues, improbable coincidences, absurd deaths, impossible rescues and too-late reunions of long-lost lovers and relatives. It lampoons the histrionics of 19th century novels and pushes soap opera extremes to lunatic levels as the mystery slowly untwists to reveal the murderer of Gene's father.

As the sane center of the show, Ryan Parker Knox makes Gene's reactions to the derangements around him sympathetic and believable.

Practically every other character has a strange obsession. Gene's college classmate — played with verve by Jaimi Paige — is obsessed with their Russian literature professor and wants to be Anna Karenina.

Their brooding, boozing professor feels compelled to mimic the murderer in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment, and Jim Pounds plays him with loony finesse as he stalks Brad, a "boring" fix-it man. Steve Lewis is a hoot as Brad, transforming him from dull to psychotic with nervous hand gestures and puppy-dog eyes. At one point, Brad says he's decided to write a story about the creepy "laughing devil head" that lives in his wallpaper and talks to him. "It's a children's story," he says.

The absurdity of the play reaches apocalyptic proportions with an excess of grotesquery and over-the-top melodrama, as garbage — and bodies — pile up in a surreal version of New York, where the garbage men are on strike, packs of dogs roam the streets, and the cops have left town.

As to why Gremlin decided to mount such a horrifically hilarious play, one can only guess that the devil made them do it.

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