" How are things going? " three characters relentlessly ask one another in Salutations, one of three short plays that make up Ionesco, Not Ionesco. After " Nicely " is gotten out of the way, responses fly in a rhythmic stream of nonsense: Apoplectically. Barometrically. Circumlocutionally. If such sentiments express your own temperament, you will respond enthusiastically to this hearty dose of Eugene Ionesco. If not, the medicine may be even more beneficial, as a reminder that the planet spins on a wobbly axis of contradiction. In any case, the treatment is proficiently dispensed by Molasses Tank Productions in its evening of lesser-known one-act plays — rather, " anti-plays " — by Romanian-born French dramatist Ionesco, chief of staff on the absurdity ward of modern drama.

If the business of theater, as Shakespeare says, is to hold a mirror up to nature, then Ionesco wields a funhouse looking glass that distorts and burlesques conformity, societal convention, and language. Consider the standard greeting spewed by the frenzied characters of Salutations. With their salvo of ludicrous replies, the playwright snatches the rug out from under a civil ritual and illustrates his trademark contempt for both social regulations and the inadequacy of speech. Actors Jason Beals, John Morton, and Michael F. Walker add their own lively dash to the proceedings. Whether scampering nimbly at the outset or sluggishly dragging toward the end of the time-collapsed day, they so savor the sound and sensation of each utterance as it rolls off their lips that they almost persuade us that Ionesco’s right about its being impossible to assign meanings to words.

The swift-paced clowning in Salutations, the evening’s second play, is a mental palate-cleanser between two heavier courses. But though the opening and closing playlets are dense in the idea department, the ensemble delivers them, too, with enough feisty physical buffoonery to keep the pieces from coming across as didactic.

Improvisations is an exercise in meta-theatrics in which a character called Ionesco takes a lead role in a script about writing a script about the scene we are witnessing. As the playwright, Walker is bedraggled in appearance and exasperated in attitude. Enter three critics whom Morton, Beals, and Lara B. Krepps infuse with pedantic pretentiousness borrowed from New Yorker cartoon figures. They assault the scribe with gossip about the " scientific " actors and directors in town, gross factual errors about theater (don’t be fooled by the erudite-sounding assertion that " Shakespeare is a Russian " ), and tongue-twisting tautological hogwash about " costumology " and " audiencology. " In the process they trounce the writer’s worldview, not to mention his confidence, and render him a feeble marionette manipulated by their pronouncements.

Improvisations may be best understood as an anxious discourse on Oscar Wilde’s remark that " The primary aim of a critic is to see an object as it really is not. " (No comment.) When the Ionesco character insists that critics " should describe and not prescribe, " we hear the playwright inveighing against the aggravations he faced when he clashed with the rigid theories imposed on him and his midcentury avant-garde contemporaries by traditionalist critics.

Wilde’s spirit is further evoked in The Picture, which recalls The Picture of Dorian Gray in its meditation on how a painting can interfere with reality. A swindling businessman (Beals) who’s " starving for beauty " negotiates with a painter (Walker) for a portrait that might satisfy his aesthetic craving while he tends to his ill, shrill shrew of a sister. In one of the evening’s comic high points, Krepps portrays her as something of a testy, decrepit Mother Hubbard.

The three plays are crisply directed by Steve Rotolo (who, in the spirit of Improvisations, is referred to in the program as Master Theatricologist). He manages actors with a knockabout comedic spirit that seems equally informed by vaudeville clowning and Woody Allen kvetching.

If the program’s title still has you baffled, consider René Magritte’s image of a pipe accompanied by the inscription, " Ceci n’est pas une pipe " ( " This is not a pipe " ). It is with similarly assured matter-of-factness that Ionesco addresses the unreliability of actuality. Really.