For Shrimps, Zany Waters Run Deep : Theater: The wild and woolly performance-art troupe uses klutzy antics to illuminate weighty topics.

Don’t let the buffoonery, wacky costumes and goofy name throw you. Shrimps, a performance-art collective known for camp and klutziness, can also get into serious stuff.

“We tend toward messes,” says member Ryan Hill, “and it’s always comic.”

But take the theme of the group’s new work, “Screech,” which premieres tonight at the Huntington Beach Art Center: environmental destruction.

“We’re looking at our relationship to the natural world,” says Shrimps artistic director Pamela Casey, “and creating a kind of alternate view of living in the world.”

The alternative view will be created by “taking on certain attributes of animals and plants, so that we become humans perceiving the world through their perspective,” Casey explained.

“The way we think about animals and plants creates our relationship with them,” she said. “So [we want to ask] is it possible to rethink our position, and would that alter our environment? The performance is like a laboratory experiment, a big petri dish. We’re testing out things in the hopes we could achieve a better balance.”

Shrimps co-founder Casey creates works in collaboration with the five performers in the 10-year-old Los Angeles-based group--Gail Youngquist, Weba Garretson, Hill, Steven Nagler and Cindy Shine. They use a mix of spoken word and movement, Casey said. But that doesn’t begin to describe their wild and woolly antics.

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In the past, the troupe has addressed gender issues, abortion rights and other matters by dressing men in wooden hula skirts, tap-dancing madly and engaging in enough gawky fumbling to raise klutziness to a fine art.

Ensemble members have slammed into one another, smashed big squashes and hurled basketballs about (once unintentionally smacking a critic on the forehead).

“This performance isn’t going to be as brutal as some of our previous performances,” Casey said during a recent phone interview from her Claremont home.

Because animals spend much of their time trying to survive, “we wanted to be performing life-sustaining tasks like nest-building, scavenging, protecting and nurturing, although we’ll be including fighting too.”

Added Hill: “There’s a lot of bird imagery in it, and a lot of commentary about our relationship to nature and like a twisting around of what nature is. But it’s pretty impressionistic stuff. There’s not one singular meaning to glean off of it. That’s what makes it challenging.”

Their costumes consist of feathers, fake fur and body paint--materials that “identify us with something natural,” Casey said. “We’re also looking at certain human perspectives, so we take on different voices. You’ll recognize rhetoric you’ve heard from animal activists or corporate discourse” pertaining to environmental issues.

With such weighty topics at stake, why bring in the silliness?

“We’ve always worked very physically,” Casey said. “We try to evoke a visceral response from the audience and we like to evoke a lot of complex emotions.

“When you say emotions , a lot of people think happy or sad,” she said. “But we like to mix in pathos and humor or silliness to point up the vulnerability of the human condition or how complex our situation is as humans and how we become entrenched in things we don’t even particularly believe in or with systems that are destructive to humanity in the natural world.”

* Shrimps will premiere “Screech” tonight at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. 8 p.m. $7. (714) 374-1650.