THEATER REVIEW / ‘AUNT DAN’ : Moral of the Story : Wallace Shawn’s family saga examines the twisted reasoning that attempts to justify ethical failure.

In the film “My Dinner With Andre,” actor-playwright Wallace Shawn argued quite, er--heatedly--with theater director Andre Gregory in support of the qualitative change his electric blanket had brought to his life, despite Andre’s warning that it cut him off from reality.

“Our lives are tough enough as it is,” Shawn said.

But where Shawn the actor asserted the importance of comfort in fending off the beatings of the world, Shawn the playwright sets out to make his audience as uncomfortable as possible, by denying them tidy resolutions to the troublesome issues he raises.

In “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” the cause of Shawn’s discomfort is nothing less than the capacity for evil in all of us, and the rationalizations we invoke to justify inflicting evil on others.

Director Robert G. Egan’s staging for the UC Santa Barbara Theatre Artists Group is chillingly effective. In an ingratiatingly direct address to the audience, Lemon, a quiet, charming Englishwoman, invites us into her home and into her innermost thoughts, and shows us the twisted path of reasoning that has led her to embrace fascism.

With matter-of-fact simplicity that only heightens our mounting unease, Delta Rae Giordano plays our narrator, Lemon, who is equally at home reminiscing about idyllic childhood walks at sunset with her parents and her Aunt Danielle or recounting the Nazi atrocities she reads about devotedly every night.

While these topics might seem like polar opposites, they’re inextricably linked in Shawn’s free-associative construction (and visually coalesced in Jay Michael Jagim’s ever-shifting scenic design).

For it was the fiercely intellectual Aunt Dan (Meredith McMinn), Lemon’s happiest childhood companion, who introduced her to the philosophical positions that became the basis for her current conclusions, that the Nazis were misunderstood humanists trying to do what they thought was right.

An extended sequence involves Lemon’s re-creation of an argument between her mother and Aunt Dan in which Dan defends the Vietnam policies of Henry Kissinger, idolizing him as a martyred leader who had to make tough choices.

“The whole purpose of government is to use force,” Dan argues, “so we don’t have to. So if I move into your house and refuse to leave, you don’t have to kick me or punch me, you don’t have to go find some acid to throw into my face--you just nicely have to pick up the phone and call the police! And if some other country attacks our friends in Southeast Asia, you and I don’t have to go over there and fight them with rifles--we just get Kissinger to fight them for us.”

The ease with which we can abdicate our moral principles for the sake of convenience is a source of fascination and horror for Shawn, and he illustrates that lack of moral foundation in a sordid scene of deadly cat-and-mouse between a prostitute (Shana M. Lynch) and her john (Matthew Katics).

Actors Robert Langenbucher and Ellen Margolis assume multiple supporting roles in Lemon’s recollections, but they’re most memorable as, respectively, the father so obsessed with business that Lemon calls him “a caged animal . . . unsanitary in every way” and the mother who argues for compassion in the face of Aunt Dan’s impassioned defense of Kissinger.

For Lemon, compassion is just an annoyingly indefinable fiction, and she speaks with admiration of the Nazis’ courage to live without it. What’s scariest of all is her calm, orderly thinking that builds upon barely perceptible distortions, a direct challenge to our complacent notions that we’re too sophisticated to recognize evil when we see it.

Shawn is not a fatalist, but he believes we have to struggle with our own capacity for moral choice. And he refuses to let us off the hook within the confines of this play.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Aunt Dan and Lemon” will be performed tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the UC Santa Barbara Main Theater. Tickets are $12. Call 893-3535 for reservations and information.