It sounds like a stunt. A funky downtown company, known and loved for its opaque, irreverent texts, decides to become a band. They get the requisite MySpace page, a four-month crash course in musicianship, and a “gig” at P.S. 122. Yet when Banana Bag & Bodice takes the stage as the strung-out rockers the Rising Fallen, they leapfrog past spoof and into something like opera. True, they make a rocky show — amps hiss and speeches occasionally drag, and, as with many bands, there seems to be one too many members. But the requisite theatrical alchemy has taken place. If it looks like a duck and kicks out the jams like a duck, then make way for some ducklings.

The audience is already on tenterhooks by the time the band enters — a prologue by a stumbling, dazed fan has informed us that something awful, or possibly sublime, went down once at a Rising Fallen show, when lead singer Francoise (Peter Blomquist) rocked the audience members’ minds off. We picture Altamont, but with sheer sonic awesomeness standing in for the Hell’s Angels.

The band walks in. They stride to their places. Jacko (Jason Craig) starts a driving, angry bass line; Mosey (Jessica Jelliffe) thunders on her drums; Ada (Heather Peroni) starts running on what could best be called a rhythm-section treadmill. The smell of ozone is in the air, history is in the offing … and Francoise does a faceplant. It turns out that the weight of brilliance can be very, very heavy. With the mood punctured, the band begins to unfurl its troubled tale, one bizarre monologue at a time.

After a lean year, the Rising Fallen found itself playing sets on the oil-rig circuit, stranded out in the ocean with no one but burly crude-pumping Swedes to listen to them. In fact, the group may still be on one of these massive machines, off the coast of the Faeroe Islands, playing as part-captive, part-resident rockers. Sexual and mythic entanglements immediately ensue while Francoise goes spectacularly off the deep end, Mosey tells weird tales of skeleton hands that once selected the Norse kings. Meanwhile, Westie (Rod Hipskind), who plays tambourine, has begun an intense affair with an oilman, who may have infiltrated the band as guitar player Casey Opstad. At least, it does seem suspicious that Opstad actually knows how to play guitar.

The songs, penned by Mr. Blomquist, tread a weird line between satire and subject. When they tip to the silly (“A dog and monkey gonna go find all the candy”), the show teeters a little. They are better off balancing on the divide. Mr. Blomquist certainly has the charisma necessary to sell songs — even “Rape Squad” — without winking.

Director Mallory Catlett somehow keeps this self-made myth and pounding rock revolving. That’s no mean feat, because the show’s author, Jason Craig, likes to spin long, logorrheic prose-poems, which often lead nowhere, or back into their own beginnings. His writing, particularly in dialogue, sounds like Henry Miller having a fight with Will Ferrell — dark, rich images interspersed with insults like, “You’re a moist sock.” It’s gorgeous stuff, but Mr. Craig’s characters never quite operate independently. When Mosey prophesies, or when Westie wigs, they do so in essentially identical voices. Luckily for us, that overbearing tonal sameness only emphasizes the band’s portrait as a hive-mind. “The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen” is like 2005’s majestically cloacal incest-fest “The Sewers”; both get their charge from a humming claustrophobia.

Peter Ksander, the crack set-designer who made “The Sewers” into a stygian nightmare, helped put together the green room cum womb cum pedestal into which the band nestles for the duration. Propped up on a tapering base (just like an oil rig stabbing down into the ocean), they thrash about in Miranda Hardy’s flickering, aqueous lighting. Ms. Catlett and team have some of the best eyes south of 14th Street — their shows have a visual excitement that bigger budgets would be hard pressed to match. But, of course, it’s the sound that makes this show. It would be overstating the case to say the music stands alone; the group has made a show more successfully than it has made a band. Still, record deal or not, they can still make their audiences rave.

Until May 7 (150 First Ave. at East 9th Street, 212-477-5288).