Glen Berger's dream project, a play that's consumed him for years, is about a stuffed goat. Berger describes the play with unabashed relish: "He's been revived to life by this mysterious pain. His life as he remembers it was simply being tethered to a post at a cottage somewhere outside of Dublin between 1910 and 1922, near a rubbish heap, and every now and then scraps of rubbish would blow in front of him and then blow away again. So the only bits of beauty that he ever knew were like the wrapper of a cake of soap that had a mermaid on it. So he conjures up these scenes of great beauty, except that they don't have any real beauty in them at all." Berger pauses to describe the recordings of Henry Burr, a tenor who was enormously popular around 1918 and whose great earnestness, lost in our self-conscious modernity, reflects the tone the play should have. "But the ultimate part of the story is about an inventor who develops a patent for a certain plunger mechanism in toilets, a sort of wastewater preventer--British patent #2033--based on the idea that water always finds its own level, which becomes a very meaningful concept for this goat, because he's trying to find out how can he endure...."

This captures a bit of the mystery of Berger's work: Wild concatenations of forgotten historical footnotes, philosophical musings, and rich emotional cravings. His astonishing play Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22, which opens this weekend at the Empty Space, depicts the obsessive exploits of two obscure 18th-century scientists--one a Frenchman who struggles to build a mechanical duck that he believes will prove that the universe was purposefully designed; the other an Italian investigating the nature of semen with an experiment that requires small pairs of taffeta pants for frogs. The world premiere of Great Men of Science, at Circle X Theatre in Los Angeles, received rave reviews and won two prominent awards.

"Everything about that production sort of said, 'It's going to be okay. Don't panic,'" Berger recalls with pleasure. "'Yes, it's going to have some science in it. They're going to speak in a pseudo 18th-century speech. But it might also be funny!' My writing needs that element in the design, so the audience can relax a little bit. I've had other productions where from the first five minutes the audience is being told 'It might not be okay. It might hurt a little bit.' And that's horrible."

Fortunately, the Empty Space production is in promising hands. The impeccable cast includes Eric Ray Anderson, Burton Curtis, Lori Larsen, and Seanjohn Walsh--actors who are both skilled and extremely idiosyncratic performers, bringing a strong personal flavor that should mesh wonderfully with Berger's eccentric characters. Director Dan Fields has known Berger since their early days at Annex Theatre, where Berger's earliest plays (including The Wooden Breeks and Bessemer's Spectacles) were first produced. Speaking of his early days in Seattle, Berger reflects, "We didn't get it right a lot of the time, but that sort of crucible of experimentation was invaluable. If someone had said, 'Do you need a crucible of experimentation right now?' I would have said, 'No.' But it turns out I did."

Glen Berger's work feels like what an entire generation of playwrights have been struggling to write. His characters bubble over with passions that are both compelling and absurd; his stories use the simplest things to launch into enormous conceptual landscapes. For example, his evening-length monologue, Under the Lintel (currently being done in L.A.), follows a Dutch librarian who discovers that a bookmark in a travel guide is a claim ticket for a pair of trousers left at a Chinese laundry in London 85 years earlier, and who from there finds himself on the trail of the mystical Wandering Jew. "The story," Berger summarizes with impish enthusiasm, "is about how do any of us authenticate our existence against the backdrop of four billion years of Earth history, 13 billion years of the universe--what are we left with? At best, scraps. So it's a comedy."