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The Yale Summer Cabaret really distinguished itself from other Connecticut theaters this summer. It wasn’t the only theater to offer dark and challenging material at a time when most of the offerings are light and frothy — kudos are due Westport Playhouse for programming “Grounded,” “Appropriate” and “Sex With Strangers” and Hartford Stage for bringing in “Our Tchaikovsky.” But the SumCab season has been uncompromising and audacious on a level that is rarely seen, even in new-works-crazy Connecticut.

The Summer Cabaret selects a new creative team every summer. With few exceptions, the actors, designers and administrators are current students at the Yale School of Drama. Most already have impressive professional theater credits — no amateurs here. A hardy board of directors and a loyal local audience assure that the SumCab company can dream big and take grand creative risks.

Young Jean Lee is a highly regarded off-Broadway playwright and director who will make her Broadway debut with “Straight White Men” next year. Her works, which also include “Church” and “We’re Gonna Die,” test the barriers of theater, breaking not just the fourth wall but long-held theatrical ideas of structure and decorum. They can be abrasive and discomforting but are also highly entertaining.

“Lear” is Young Jean Lee’s riff on aspects of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” though it features almost none of Shakespeare’s dialogue. It shows us Regan and Goneril (the selfish daughters of Lear) and Edmund and Edgar (the selfish sons of the Earl of Gloucester) idly recalling the horrors to which they subjected their parents.

The mix of cliched regal theater costumes (modeled on a runway at the outset of the play) and modern trappings (a giant flatscreen TV on which the men play video games) recalls Sophia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” movie.

“Lear” plays at the Yale Summer Cabaret in New Haven through Aug. 13.

The whole affair is conducted by five evenly matched actors —Stephen Cefalu Jr., Danielle Chaves, Amandla Jahava, Jake Ryan Lozano and Francesca Fernandez McKenzie — who maintain grace and control while having to shift styles sharply throughout the intense 75-minute show. Director Shadi Ghaheri and the designers (particularly scenic designer Stephanie Osin Cohen and projection designer Yaara Bar) make sure the abrupt though gentle transitions have the maximum impact.

It’s impossible to describe this performance accurately in words. Tone, movement, sound and silence are crucial to its meaning. What begins as a modern Shakespeare pastiche becomes obsessed with death, innocence, dolphins and a certain muppet-filled PBS-TV children’s series (the same one that inspired the musical “Avenue Q,” coming soon to Playhouse on Park.)

There is no point in revealing any of the surprises — or any of the moments in which nothing happens. The show may seem unpredictable and unmoored, but it is in fact fluid and fascinating. “Lear” is definitely in there. The emphasis on the contemporary social and sexual senses of these classical characters culminates a Yale Summer Cabaret season has already examined and updated such strong female theater archetypes as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Euripides’ Trojan Women and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

It would be a reach to say that Yale Summer Cabaret is blazing trails. The theater chooses bracing scripts and performs them powerfully, but these are in fact known plays done in New York and on college campuses often enough. What the Cabaret’s programming suggests is that other theaters might be able to take bigger risks, especially in the summertime. There’s a place for dark underground ideas and storm-blasted King Lear heaths in the warm months.

LEAR by Young Jean Lee, directed by Shadi Ghaheri, is at the Yale Summer Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven, through Aug. 13. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday at both 7 and 10 p.m. and Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30, $15 for students. 203-432-1567, summercabaret17.org.