By Robert Avila

THERE ARE ANY number of things to wonder about when it comes to society's current attitude toward the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, but here's a place to start: Why are certain minorities overrepresented in mental institutions? British playwright Joe Penhall's intriguing comedy Blue/Orange, enjoying a lively Bay Area premiere at the Aurora Theatre, gives no clear-cut answer to that question. Instead, it neatly sets the parameters for a stimulating exploration of the problem, one that encompasses (and reaches beyond) race, class, and sex to glimpse the foundations of social control in the very structures of language and authority.

It's very funny too. Blue/Orange brings a muscular satirical wit and a lean but jagged plotline to the battle between a junior and senior psychiatrist over the best course of action toward a black male patient. The play is set in a psychiatric ward and staged in the round, like a spectator sport or observational surgery, and while the staid institutional furniture may be static for the duration, the tables never stop turning.

Christopher (Paul Oliver) has almost completed a mandatory 28 days of inpatient observation after a psychotic episode in a public market. His doctor, a young resident named Bruce (T. Edward Webster), believes Christopher might be schizophrenic and wants to keep him longer for a proper diagnosis – a completely unacceptable idea to his supervising physician, Robert (Paul Whitworth), who insists on a diagnostic path of least resistance since standard procedure calls for Christopher to be let out (a standard he upholds with frank reference to beds and balance sheets). Christopher, for his part, is raring to go, and openly antagonistic to any thought of having to stay beyond his mandatory four weeks. But when Bruce demonstrates to the senior doctor that his patient perceives the oranges on the table to be bright blue and his father to be Idi Amin, things get trickier for everyone.

Penhall's clever setup and snappy dialogue get first-class treatment from director Tom Ross and his exceptional cast, and so we're all basically committed from the get-go. Christopher strikes us as manic and edgy for sure, but to what extent might Bruce's seeming unwillingness to release him be at fault? Is Christopher really mentally ill? And what does that mean anyway? We're given cause to wonder, since Bruce's supervisor deftly brings the relevant terms into question (if only to chart a clear course on the organizational sea he sails, and defeat his student's deplorable boat-rocking).

Whitworth's superb, very amusing Robert is the status-seeking academic as a great panjandrum of managerial authority – a combination the good doctor eagerly embraces, though it threatens in the present tussle with his sharp young subordinate to push his derivative workaday theories deep into quack country.

But if Bruce is the young idealist to Robert's cynical higher-up, he too manifests serious flaws. While he refuses to play the apparatchik, we see too clearly that his rush to institutionalize Christopher may do far more harm than good; the young doctor may be as in thrall to his idealism (at the expense of the human being in his care) as the older doctor is to his material interests.

In fact, the beauty of Robert's argument against further institutionalizing Christopher is its strategic deployment of the truth, or what sounds like the truth, despite the institutional context that lends it cynical ends. Indeed, those ends seem no more harmful than anything Bruce might accomplish, in the same context, with the best of intentions. This irony reaches an early sardonic peak as Robert – the incarnation of the system's complacency and all too banal evils – defends giving Christopher the boot and saving the bed by floating the radical ideas of his profession's iconic iconoclast regarding the social construction of schizophrenia. "You'll start citing RD Laing next," Bruce chides. "Actually, that was RD Laing," Robert responds.

The struggle between Robert and Bruce becomes so preoccupying that they can become oblivious to the presence of the patient. It's telling, of course. The ins and outs of their debate are hardly academic. (Well anyway, not only academic.) As the play acknowledges, England's Afro-Caribbean population, like Africans in general, has been overdiagnosed as schizophrenic, bringing the politics of race center stage.

And as Christopher progressively exhibits signs of being seriously unwell, we're left to ask who this subject of observation, controversy, and concern really might be. Not only do Bruce and Robert fill him up with their own words and ideas (albeit with unpredictable results) but so, apparently, do the TV and newspaper. In working through the agon between the dueling doctors, the play implicitly calls Christopher's very subjectivity into question, as if in this context he can only be a vessel for other voices. Oliver's wonderfully brash, kinetic performance contrasts disquietingly with this absence gradually enveloping his character.

Penhall's theatrical economy (matched by the spare detail of Kate Boyd's set) is as good as his barbed wit and dramatic reversals. The three characters triangulate a system of power so pervasive it gets hard to see where the individual starts and the discourse ends. Are the boundaries between patient and doctor, mental health and illness, strict, or are they points on a continuum?

The play doesn't need to answer such questions to make rich humor and compelling drama out of them. Laing's idea that madness could be understood as a healthy response to an insane world may lie outside the mainstream of medicine, but it's a truism for art. In the theater, everyone knows that "taking false for true, fictions for real" is not just the schizophrenic's dilemma.

'Blue/Orange' runs through May 15. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. $28-$45. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org.