Tragedy was born, old-school anthropologists will tell you, when a dithyramb singer stepped out of the chorus and decided to act out the story instead. Western theater owes everything to that scene-stealer.

“The Invention of Tragedy,” Mac Wellman’s semi-choral, pleasantly baffling ode to theater and mob mentality, part of a festival at the Flea Theater devoted to his work, re-creates that moment. But with cat tails, communion wine and, as the chorus says, “words and greater words of estuarial conviviality.” Get it? Probably not.

For three decades and counting, Mr. Wellman, a professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College and a guru to a generation of writers, has manufactured dozens of wordy, cheerfully inscrutable plays. Even calling them plays can seem like a stretch as they mostly take an ax (in “The Invention of Tragedy,” that ax is literal, if rubber) to frills like plot and character and basic grammar. You could call his works stream of consciousness, except that they are more like torrents. Torrents that love wordplay. That the Greek word “tragedy” loosely translates as “goat song” might explain the menagerie here.

“The Invention of Tragedy” begins, like ancient rituals before it, with a choral ode, though this one discusses “hope apples, hope apples and donuts of every silvery degree” and is delivered by ten young women in matching robes and ruffs . (Why ruffs? I’d bet it’s a dog pun.) One woman, the Answerer (Drita Kabashi), arrives late, and just can’t seem to chant in time with her sisters. Unable to lose herself in the chorus, she outs herself as a cat person; the other women seem to be dog-identified. (It would explain the butt sniffing.) Threatened, she flees to a forest and meets a disenfranchised hare (Susan Ly). The chorus returns, in cat form . Twice. They are accompanied by an organist (Sarah Alice Shull), who voices stage directions like, “Macrurous pause of feline strangeness.”