The trouble is clear right from the outset: Michael and Veronica have always regarded Cobble Hill Park as a haven of serenity — unlike Whitman Park, where, presumably, the bad kids play. So when Alan and Anette’s son Benjamin takes a stick to their darling Henry and knocks out a couple of his teeth, well, the civilized thing, the Cobble Hill thing, is to have a sit down with the offender’s parents and work things out.

But while A&A are well dressed and agreeable enough, it isn’t long before Alan announces that he has no manners and his son is a savage, while Annette simply isn’t ready to grovel. Not that Michael and Veronica are paragons: he roaringly declares himself a Neanderthal, and she can’t resist airing dirty laundry about a hamster that’s been let out of its cage. (Ding ding ding!) And all that is before the rum starts to flow. Next stop, Whitman Park, or maybe Darfur.

The conversational rhythms are subtle and taut; the humor — and this is very much a comedy — is broad, and brawny, and black. The telephone connections to humanity outside the living room battlefield mostly involve lying. And the honesty that prevails inside is of the caustic, corrosive variety: the matter of manhood is much discussed, while womanhood gets investigated less directly (but no less harshly).

But what drives the humor here are the people, not their ideas — the way they just can’t help but say one more thing. And what makes the people work is the cast, which abandons itself utterly to the play’s anarchic vision and escalating emotion (and action). There are times when they careen past moments that might have been more effective if given a moment’s pause, but they’re easy to miss amid the mayhem. An acidic and acerbic good-bad time.