Luis Astudillo, left, R. Bobby, Elizabeth Keiser (on floor) and Gloria Crist in Sweet Disaster at Perishable Theatre

Terry Higgins

Sweet Disaster, Charlotte Meehan’s kaleidoscopic play about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the death of her husband from colon cancer, and who knows what else, is both funny and touching — in an absurdist sort of way.

The latest from Perishable Theatre, Sweet Disaster is a crazy mixed-up look at people whose lives have been torn apart by disasters big and small. It’s an enigmatic play that unfolds like a deck of cards tossed in the air.

But it also offers such an intensely private take on the world, and is so full of personal associations, that it’s a little hard for an outsider to decipher. Its fractured images come at you so fast, in such abbreviated snippets, that it’s impossible to string them together into anything resembling a traditional narrative. And don’t even think about looking for logic.

That’s okay, I suppose. For life is hardly a linear, clear-cut proposition. But Meehan’s brand of scatter-shot abstraction makes it difficult to plug into her cast of anonymous characters, who are more talking heads spouting non-sequiturs than flesh-and-blood figures.

These are not people with engaging stories to tell, at least in the conventional sense. They are not people we get to know and empathize with like, say, the residents of Thornton Wilder’s sleepy Grover’s Corners. The characters who populate Sweet Disaster are more like the phantoms encountered in dreams, people who fade in and out of focus, who seem to make sense, but then again, maybe not.

At the start of the play, we drop in on a curious group-therapy session, where characters stand around wondering who they are and who they might have been.

“And then I said to myself,” says a woman, “where’s my mother? I can’t feel my shoulder.”

From there, the cast regroups in an insurance office, where a woman rattles off a list of mishaps that are eligible for payouts, the loss of a hand, a foot or thumb.

There are episodes, too, with a shady mechanic, a bossy real estate agent and a priest who cares more about dispensing Hail Marys than listening to his penitent.

Perhaps the most vivid scene is enacted with a puppet that has been diagnosed with cancer. For a brief moment there is a story to be told here, as the puppet succumbs to its illness and is laid out on a puffy white pillow.

It is not surprising that the play is so personal, so self-referential, though. Meehan, who teaches playwriting at Wheaton College, has been though some disasters of her own in recent years.

She was living in lower Manhattan with her filmmaker husband and three-month-old daughter when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. She saw the planes fly over and felt her apartment building shake.

Traumatized by the event, she left the city, and took a job at Wheaton the following spring. Within a year, her husband, David Hopkins, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The two discussed working together on a project when Hopkins became ill, but it was not until after his death four years ago that Meehan took up Sweet Disaster in earnest. What she came up with was a shattered 90-minute snapshot of her life that weaves bits and pieces of Hopkins’ animated films into the fabric of the play. But those are just as cryptic as much of the dialogue, and add little in the way of content.

For this production, directed by Brown University’s Ken Prestininzi, Perishable’s black box theater has been reconfigured, with the seats pushed to the sides flanking an oval platform strewn with bits of paper and a couple of fold-up chairs. Now and then a cast member retreats to blackened corner where a microphone is set up, and for the insurance office scene, a woman sits behind huge frame at a computer keyboard.

I recognized a couple of members of the cast, but was otherwise in the dark as to who was playing whom. Meehan has named her characters after letters of the alphabet, and they are never referred to in the script, making them hard to identify.

But there were some comic moments from Elizabeth Keiser, who has done quite a bit of work at Providence Black Repertory Company. A couple of times, while sitting in a chair, she keeled over and plopped down in a pile of pillows. And later in the play, during a Beach Boys number, she stripped down to an aqua swim suit and hopped inside an inner tube.

Luis Astudillo, last seen at Perishable in Christine Evans’ Weightless, played A with a kind of cool aloofness.

But the acting, overall, is pretty stylized, which only adds to the surreal quality of the show.

By now you have no doubt realized that Sweet Disaster is not a play for traditionalists, people who like tidy, conventional theater with all the dots connected. This is much more of a challenge, a play that requires patience and a willingness to put your own personal spin on a very personal story.

And it’s hard to crack on a first viewing. But you take away from it what you can, trying your best to deal with its fleeting impressions.

Sweet Disaster runs through May 11 at Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St., Providence. Tickets are $20, $15 for seniors, students and members of the military. Call (410) 621-6123 or log on to www.arttixri.com.

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cgray@projo.com