On June 30, 1908, an unknown object of extraterrestrial origin smashed into the earth's atmosphere over Tunguska, Siberia, and disintegrated with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs. Witnesses 40 miles away were blown out of their chairs. Superstitious locals believed it was the falling of a god. Luckily, only trees and a few reindeer were killed.

Sixty-five million years ago, a meteor hit near Chicxulub in the Yucatán with enough force to fling debris into space. The event left a layer of iridium around the world and contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs, yet that was a mere fender bender. The apocalypse called the Permian extinction, aka the Great Dying, nearly vanquished the entire biosphere 251.4 million years ago. The planet didn't regain vitality for tens of millions of years - and no one knows what caused the event. But the real story is that evolution slipped through the bottleneck, albeit in a radically altered direction. We exist as the descendants of cosmological crash victims.

If that seems heady, wait until you get a load of playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom at Harlequin. It begins as a Craiglist "casual encounter" in a college science lab ("also an exhibit," the script mentions offhandedly). Jo answers Jules's invitation, which promises "sex to change the course of the world." She quickly realizes Jules has grander purposes, relevant to his passion for the hive-mind behavior of fish. (Nachtrieb studied fish in Panama, and has a degree in "Theater and Biology" from Brown.) Jules is a G-rated brainiac ill-suited to a casual fling with a coed, and Jo drops the F-bomb on her fifth line and never dials it back. Jules will be in a makeshift cast before romance develops.

The script is seldom as funny as the opening-night audience wanted it to be. To fully appreciate its humor, you have to be the kind of science nerd who finds the idea of a modern dance paean to the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" sidesplitting. Director Linda Whitney is fully aware of this challenge and throws Harlequin's most blockbuster effects at it, which is saying something. The design and technical teams have outdone themselves here. Seriously: boom starts amazing and just gets better. It's like a Universal stunt show as written by Richard Dawkins.

Trick Danneker, so whimsical and funny in Taming of the Shrew, brings jumpy, cerebral enthusiasm to Jules. Melanie Moser is plausible and sexy as the frustrated Jo, though her comic approach tends to pinball tangentially off of laugh lines rather than smacking them directly. The stealth talent here is Casi Wilkerson as Barbara, a museum docent in weirdly piscine eye makeup. She brings authority and insight to Barbara's inhumanly elliptical monologues.

Full disclosure: Linda Whitney and I share a brain. We have identical tastes and obsessions, and I admire her ambition for rolling the dice on a show that's too smart for a lot of rooms. While boom never quite touches the humanity and hilarity of last year's End Days, it does complete (with The Last Schwartz) an apocalyptic Harlequin trilogy that was a nonstop credit to the company. In the aftermath of a tragedy that erased thousands of lives and relocated an entire country 12 feet to the right, I appreciate Whitney's daring in bringing us three unremittingly thinky plays about Armageddon. I'm eager to see where she takes us once the End Days are out of her system.

boom

Through April 16, 8 p.m. Thursday–Saturday
2 p.m. Sunday,  $28–$31
Harlequin Productions, 202 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
360.786.0151