Historians believe that less than 13% of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides still exist. About 180 of their works are gone forever, lost to a still undetermined combination of fires and neglect. The idea of “Oedipus Rex,” “Medea,” “Electra,” “The Bacchae,” and the other extant works representing only one-eighth of these men’s efforts is a sobering one.

But snippets of these lost plays – about 5,000 of them – have lasted through the millennia in one capacity or another. Using only the mildest of elisions, director Pavol Liska and his wife and collaborator, Kelly Copper, have turned these stray lines and speeches into “Fragment,” a curious, intermittently dazzling if ultimately numbing bit of dramaturgical Dada.

Picture these chunks as a deluxe Magnetic Poetry set and the Classic Stage Company stage as an enormous refrigerator, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect from the dependably intrepid CSC. You might also predict that the ones creating the piece would enjoy the end product more than the rest of us.

The setting is vague and fairly banal: We are at a function, with hors d’oeuvres, plastic cups of wine, and an intentionally (I hope) odious brand of smooth jazz. As some sort of cataclysmic violence looms on the periphery, three characters circle each another, shifting from contentious debate to awkward bonding to veiled hostility as they speak Euripides’s and Sophocles’s words. Juliana Francis (the lone woman), Tony Torn (a 40-something guy prone to throwing his ample frame into a white-guy boogie), and Zachary Oberzan (a younger, bearded man) play the three unnamed characters.

Given the play’s highly presentational nature – the three do a lot more talking than listening – it takes a while for them to emerge as anything more than dispensers of homilies, gnomic wisdom, and/or portentous pronouncements. (Mr. Torn offers a litany of tips that rival that of Shakespeare’s Polonius in blow hardiness: “Try, though, to have possessions; this bestows nobility and the means to make the best marriages.”) Eventually, though, certain character traits poke through – hyperprecise Cassandra, earnest striver, self-pitying hedonist.

By the end, Mr. Torn has his pants around his ankles, Ms. Francis is weeping over a fallen relative, and Mr. Oberzan is chugging Yellow Tail chardonnay straight from the bottle. And those rumbling noises from outdoors are getting louder and closer. Mr. Liska keeps the house lights on throughout, blurring the division between audience and performers, although Tim Cryan’s lighting design has its startlingly effective moments as the outer world threatens to intrude.

“Silence is an ornament, a crown for a man with no evil in him,” Mr. Oberzan says early on, “while this blathering is bad company, / And a weakness.” And at times, it’s hard not to agree with him as the three characters talk past one another about one topic after the next – health versus wealth, saving one’s own child versus saving one’s homeland. All three performers give intelligent, naturalistic accounts of the texts, with Mr. Oberzan more than holding his own against the two experimental-theatre darlings, but the task of grounding their characters with any sort of plausible motivations proves beyond their reach. Sophocles and Euripides may have written “Fragment,” but the propulsive momentum that they helped invent is in short supply.

Still, Mr. Liska and Ms. Copper create a mood of anxiety without ever shoehorning the text into modern-day scenarios. And they know a juicy bit when they see one; the few passages to be repeated are usually the best ones. Take Ms. Francis’s thunderous scorched-earth account:

Truly,
Not even the entire sky would suffice
If God
Were writing down men’s sins,
Nor he himself to examine them and send punishment to each.

Almost as strong is this melancholy glimpse backward by Mr. Torn: “In childhood we live the happiest life, / I think, of all mankind. / But when we have understanding / And come to youthful vigor / We are pushed out and sold / And this we must approve and consider to be happiness.”

It’s hard not to wonder what slaves or warriors or bereaved relatives uttered these words originally and why. We’ll probably never know. And while it’s a fairly safe bet that they probably made more sense in context 2,400 years ago, CSC and the “Fragment” creators are to be thanked for providing them with even a somewhat comfortable home.

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Speaking of Dada, a major museum exhibit on that logic- and language-shredding art movement is on its way to the Museum of Modern Art. “Dada,” which kicked off in Paris, is currently housed at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, and it’s a blast. In addition to works by the usual suspects – Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst – the exhibit has a few sterling examples of the anarchic “sound poems” that cropped up in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire at the dawn of the movement. It’s time for MoMA, which opens the show June 18, to look into replicating some of them here and now.

These “poems without words,” written and performed by the likes of Hugo Ball and Marcel Janco, were hypnotic concertos of gibberish, chockablock with nonsense syllables and Tower of Babel mash-ups of various languages. The National Gallery included alcoves with recordings of the original sound poems, but why stop there?

Any number of modern playwrights have had their way with the English language to virtuosic effect – MoMA could give today’s audiences an even better sense of Dada’s destabilizing force by commissioning the likes of Charles L. Mee or Mac Wellman or Rinde Eckert to perform the original works and/or perform their own. (And what savvy theater company can ride the inevitable wave of MoMA publicity by mounting a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” – which features Tristan Tzara, Ball’s successor as head of the Dada contingent in Zurich – to coincide with the run?)

The sound poems may be gibberish, albeit culturally significant and enjoyably chaotic gibberish. As conveyed by some of today’s pre-eminent abstractionists, though, perhaps as part of MoMA’s ambitious Summergarden Performance Series, they may just begin to make sense.

“Fragment” until April 9 (136 E. 13th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, 212-279-4200).