Jane Gordon has a humdrum domestic life, a dull husband, a baby on the way, and a loaded gun. So did Hedda Gabler, the icon of ennui honored throughout the strenuously irreverent “Heddatron.” The similarities aren’t perfect – Henrik Ibsen didn’t give Hedda a boorish small-arms dealer for a brother-in-law, for one thing – but Jane (Carolyn Baeumler) also has her head turned by a dashing, exotic suitor.

Sadly, this particular beau cannot turn his own head. In lieu of Ibsen’s Eilert Lovborg, “Heddatron” – the latest genre-defying head-trip by the dependably bratty Les Freres Corbusier – has cast a robot. Not a guy wrapped up in tin foil and moving stiffly.An actual,endearingly uncoordinated robot. And four more ‘bots round out the cast in the high-tech “Hedda” that caps off Elizabeth Meriwether’s cracked reimagining.

Naturalism, you see, is not terribly high on Les Freres’s agenda.The young company, which has constructed a rock opera around Warren Harding and turned Robert Moses’s urban-planning schemes into a film-noir musical, lives and dies on its intellectual and presentational leaps of logic. Ms. Meriwether and director Alex Timbers apparently see an affinity between the exploding possibilities of artificial intelligence and the leap in psychological realism that Ibsen made in 1890. They never really make the case as to what differentiates this leap from any other artistic surge, but their go-for-broke energy and intellectual gluttony almost manage to disguise this setback.

We actually hear about the robots long before we see them. By the time we meet Rick (Gibson Frazier), Jane’s dishrag of a husband, and Nugget (Spenser Leigh), their 10-year-old daughter, Jane has already been abducted. (She remains onstage in a prolonged flashback, sprawled on a dingy couch and contemplating suicide.) Nugget has written a school paper titled “Hedda Gabler: Well-Made Play?” and her recitation – “This play taught me not to marry a man who buys me a house” – frequently cross-cuts to 1890 Norway. That’s where a mutton-chopped Ibsen (Daniel Larlham) sits with his unsatisfied wife (Nina Hellman) and plays with his dolls.

In a filmed prologue about the his tory of robots, much attention is given to the concept of “singularity.”This is the moment when robots become sentient, when they attain self-awareness and (the theory goes) no longer listen to us humans. Did Ibsen encounter a case of fictive singularity, where the character of Hedda sprang from his pen? Is that why the newly self-actualized robots are drawn to the play? Are Jane’s own yearnings sufficient to warrant being kidnapped by the robots and taken to the Ecuadorian rain forest to join in an enforced performance of “Hedda Gabler”? Are the creators of “Heddatron” getting too much or not enough sleep?

“Heddatron” takes its time interweaving these plot threads. In fact, Ms. Meriwether and Mr. Timbers seem interested in the Ibsen subplot primarily for its surrealist possibilities, as when his syphilitic nemesis August Strindberg (Ryan Karels) arrives to sleep with Ibsen’s wife.

In these scenes particularly, the dividing line between precocity and self-indulgence proves a bit more treacherous than in previous Les Freres productions.The flourishes and quirks start to run the asylum at several points in “Heddatron.” A motivating force for Nugget’s paper is her curiosity about what precipitated Ibsen’s shift in writing style with “Hedda Gabler.” But Ms. Meriwether and Mr. Timbers are too content to toss in Ibsen’s lisping, buxom kitchen slut (Julie Lake) and Strindberg’s monkey to actually address the question.

I’ve certainly never seen the pronunciation of Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” mined for comedy. But even that gag is mainstream by Les Freres standards: A visual reference to Ivo van Hove’s infamous New York Theatre Workshop production of “Hedda” is so ostentatiously insider that the clubby atmosphere begins to cloy. (There may well have been even more esoteric jokes that totally went over my head, in which case I’m really mad.)

I’m intentionally steering clear of any substantive discussion of the robots, in part because they arrive late in the game and in part because they really need to be seen to be believed. Two of them, the Eilert and George surrogates, take on much larger roles: One is loquacious and kind of vulgar, the other warm-hearted and dumb. Their interactions with Jane lead to the rain forest performance, which is so silly and so, well, singular that it’s worth the diffuse buildup.

If nothing else, the ungainly but entertaining finale – the “Judge Brack” got stuck in the corner of the stage at a recent performance – serves as a comforting reminder of technology’s limitations. (The man-machine divide is made even more apparent by the uniform excellence of the flesh-and-blood performers, particularly young Ms. Leigh.) Like the five whirring robots, Les Freres may have uploaded a little more data in “Heddatron” than it can process. But the capabilities of its mechanized new cast members – and of the intellectually frisky company that willed them into being – are only going to increase.

Until February 25 (145 Sixth Avenue, between Spring and Broome Streets, 212-868-4444).