Jeff Allin, Caroline Stefanie Clay and Thony Mena in Forum Theatre’s Clementine in the Lower 9.

Dan Dietz’s searing Clementine in the Lower 9, directed by Derek Goldman for the Forum Theatre, closes Saturday at Round House in Silver Spring. Loosely based on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, it is striking how easy a transition it is from the bloody spoils of war into the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

As residents know, and as most who has visited New Orleans since the storm know, the city remains scarred by the 2005 catastrophe. The fact is, if you lived through stories like this or this or this, you know how a primal, Clytemnestra scream sounds, echoed over and over in rising crime rates.

Amazingly, and uniquely, the Big Easy, more so than the Greeks (exception of Aristophanes), has always known how to laugh at its deepest woes—and mean it. Something which this production captures expertly.

“I left my methadone clinic in my other pants,” Clementine snaps after her perpetual fuck-up of a husband, Jaffy (Jeff Allin), brings home a frighteningly pale, skinny, damaged young girl named Cassy (Megan Graves), a junkie trying to get clean, who may or may not be possessed by the god Apollo. (Given New Orleans’ affiliation with the supernatural, the touches of magical realism fit in seamlessly).

A ferociously loyal, loving wife and mother (played with radiant compassion by Caroline Stefanie Clay), Clementine is trying to fix everything at once—even those things that are not fixable. Coming home after many months scraping by in Texas, trying to earn a store of cash with which to rebuild, Jaffy might as well be returning from the Trojan War. His sad homecoming has clearly been anticipated for some time, and much is at stake.

Jaffy first appears wearing a red suit that looks too big for him, crossing the threshold to their damaged house slowly, painfully, as if every step bears the weight of actions and consequences that can never be undone. Every little action, even the jokes, in these first scenes slowly builds a sense of dread for what’s to come.

No small player itself, the set is a wonder, unwrapping layer by layer—first a beautiful chaos of old furniture, cracked photographs hanging on the wall (which are eventually used as powerful characters in their own rite; ghosts of a bygone past), plastic draped over doorways.

A backdrop of stars appears, seen through the gaping hole in the roof, smiling menacingly like the mouth of a giant wooden monster, out of which one family member managed to claw a way out while another perished, drowning in the fast-rising waters.

Tying each carefully paced scene together is an ethereal blues musician narrator, a stand-in Greek chorus, played by Scott Patterson, exuding charisma: “The gods took one look at each other and said, ‘Fuck Olympus.’ They’ve been here since.”

With a growling voice and dexterous piano playing, Patterson is also a helluva musician (and will give a post-show performance after Friday’s show).

As husband and wife, Clay and Allin have a believable chemistry that mixes deep attraction with deep unease. Jaffy’s reluctant, mistrusting family, particularly his son, Reginald (Thony Mena), who’s back in town from Columbia University, where he’s studying on scholarship, still wants him to succeed. As an audience, we, too, would like to believe that Jaffy is all there.

When Clementine says, “I’m saving my rage for the water,” it would be nice if it was that simple. But as anyone knows, levees are flawed, and can be known to break.

Clementine in the Lower 9. By Dan Dietz. Directed by Derek Goldman; at Round House Theatre (8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring) through Saturday.