Imagine a South American telenovela, written by Jerry Seinfeld and Franz Kafka, tracking four young urban adults at the turn of the millennium. Imagine it unfolding before you on a rotating turntable set divided into four rooms.

And imagine this mundane/surreal epic spanning the first decade of the 21st century.

This is the basic setup of "El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal)," a wickedly absorbing, rewarding serio-comic theater piece at On the Boards, which introduces Seattle to the ingenious work of young Buenos Aires writer-director Mariano Pensotti.

The "mega-fictions" created by Pensotti are influenced by the panoramic social novels of the 19th-century French author Balzac, but also the contemporary rock band Of Montreal (the title of this show quotes one of their songs), as well as such avant-garde filmmakers as Fassbinder, Truffaut and Godard.

That said, "El pasado es un animal grotesco" is instantly accessible — once you acclimate to the cinematic style of swiftly changing scenes on that slowly rotating set, and to speed-reading the projected English titles that translate the rapid Spanish dialogue.

Pensotti and his very agile quartet of actors lay before us, in many short scenes, a generation's worth of emotional longings, artistic pretensions and (mostly unfulfilled) ambitions.

In rotating (and at times overlapping) narratives, we drop in and out of the lives of a wannabe writer and filmmaker, Mario; a rising corporate worker, Pablo; a pretty veterinary assistant, Vicky; and the unlucky-in-love actress, Laura. We are privy to their sex lives, their secret vices, their bouts of depression and giddy infatuations.

At the start of this four-way, two-hour diary, they are in their mid-20s, with romantic notions of (and attempts at) living in Paris, conquering the art world, finding their romantic soul mates.

The characters are not politically active. But Pensotti's crisscrossing narrative cannily alludes to the way one cannot escape tumultuous events like labor strikes, student protests, Gaza uprisings.

In one memorable scene, dated September 11, 2001, friends at a birthday party argue about art while images of the Twin Towers terrorist attack play on a nearby TV. In another, Laura's Palestinian boyfriend gets radicalized, and joins the Intifada.

Pensotti has a marvelous sense of the power of the unpredictable and absurd in everyday life. And in a bizarre plot line recalling Edgar Allan Poe and "The Godfather," he introduces a dark strain of the macabre to the multi-stranded narrative.

The piece hilariously skewers the unrealistic expectations, ungrounded relationships and prolonged adolescence of Pensotti's peers.

But what makes this chronicle of hope and despair, desire and loss so watchable, and ultimately compelling, is the compassion the artist and actors evoke for their struggles — and their discoveries, with the passage of years, that one has no choice but to bear the randomness and, yes, grotesqueness of life, and to grow up.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com