Noam Chomsky, the dead-serious linguist and critic of American capitalism and imperialism, has had his brushes with the goofier realms of pop culture, from an invitation to appear on “Saturday Night Live” (he declined, apparently having barely heard of the show) to the inevitable “Simpsons” cameo.

Now, Mr. Chomsky is the star of a perhaps even more unlikely production: a puppet show.

“Manufacturing Mischief,” which will have its premiere run on April 26 and 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts a mini-Chomsky onstage alongside Elon Musk, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. Created by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, it features a zany plot involving a technology contest, a contraption called the Print-a-Friend and a surprise appearance by Donald Trump. There’s also plenty of high-flown debate about technology, freedom and inequality.

The play, which was scripted by Paul Hufker and directed by Meghan Finn, grew out of an artistic residency Mr. Reyes had last fall at M.I.T., Mr. Chomsky’s longtime intellectual home, and a place suffused, as Mr. Reyes put it, with “techno-optimism.”

“M.I.T. has this very beautiful culture of hands-on creativity,” he said in a telephone interview. “But there is also this idea that whatever the problem is, the solution is technology.”