The Ensemble Theatre Company will follow up its hit production of the adventure-comedy The Thirty-Nine Steps with a hyphenated comedy of a very different kind, August Strindberg’s Creditors, in a new translation by David Greig.

ETC Executive Artistic Director Jonathan Fox will direct the show, which will star Charles Pasternak (Adolph), Dee Ann Newkirk (Tekla) and Mitchell Thomas (Gustav). Creditors runs Thursday through April 15 in the Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St. in Santa Barbara, with the official opening night set for Saturday.

Creditors is a three-character play of peculiar intensity. The hyphenation I spoke of above refers to the penchant of most annotators to call it a “tragi-comedy.” Although there are few outright guffaws in the script, I get the “comedy” part; it’s the “tragi-” that I believe to be misplaced. You can’t really have a tragedy without a tragic hero, undone by a tragic flaw, and none of the three characters is anything of the sort. To be sure, one of the characters dies at the ends, but the death is not staged in a manner inspiring grief, passion or soul-searching. It is more like a pratfall gone wrong in a macabre bedroom farce.

The three characters are a handsome, desirable woman in — I’m guessing — her mid-30s, her somewhat younger present husband (an artist) and a somewhat older, mystery man. They meet in “a parlor in a summer hotel on the seashore.” Until the very end of the play, the three are never on stage at the same time, and the show is a series of dialogues — tense, deceptive, labyrinthine. As for the eponymous “creditors,” I will leave it to the members of the audience to discover, if they can, who owes what to whom.

In his introduction to a volume of three plays by Noël Coward (Private Lives, Hay Fever and Blythe Spirit), playwright Edward Albee admits, “I don’t know if you will become slave to all three printed here (I am still very much subject to two of them) …” One of those two, I am sure, is Private Lives — one of my all-time favorite plays, and the obvious model for Albee’s own Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . Once you have seen Creditors

, I have no doubt that you will understand immediately that both Private Lives and Virginia Woolf are its direct descendents.

Like Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner, Strindberg and Ibsen are often yoked together in anthologies and surveys, as if they were writing more or less the same sort of thing. But the two playwrights were as different, as men and/or writers, as the two composers.

For all his rage against Victorian morality, Ibsen was mostly Victorian in his outlook and social views. “Nothing so dates a person,” Anthony Powell wrote, “as the standards against which they have chosen to rebel.” The injustices of Ibsen’s time are still with us, perhaps, but I doubt that Ibsen would recognize them in their new forms. It was the human condition itself that angered Strindberg, and that doesn’t seem to date at all. He is still our contemporary.

Creditors will play at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, with a matinee at 4 p.m. Saturday, April 7. Single tickets range from $40 to $65. Discounts are available to seniors, students and groups of 10 or more. Students and young adults age 26 or younger are $20.

Subscriptions, single tickets and group tickets are available through the Ensemble Theatre box office at 805.965.5400. Click here to order online.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews.