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One is a bouncy bald guy in a bowler hat, eager to please. The other is a scraggy bearded fellow hiding in a trunk, resigned to solitude. They are the last two people on Earth, and they meet on a scrap of land that has survived a flood of global warming proportions. Somehow, they need to connect, despite their differences in temperament and their inability to communicate through anything but song.

“It is a vaudeville, but within that vaudeville, it’s about two people coming together and understanding each other’s quirks and personality,” says Susan Stroman, the show’s director. “Two people who, being alone, ultimately know that the only way they will survive now is if they get along.”

Patinkin and Mac play the two survivors of a flood of biblical (or global warming) proportions. Gaining each others’ trust through their common language — song and dance numbers — the pair run through a wild range: Rodgers and Hammerstein to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).”

A savvy theatergoer could be forgiven for supposing that the only circumstance in which Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac would create a show together would be if the two theater artists, each with very different bodies of work, were the last two people on earth.

The singular talents of Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac — yes, you read that correctly — combine to delightful effect in “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” the weird and weirdly transfixing entertainment having its premiere here at American Repertory Theater.

The singular talents of Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac — yes, you read that correctly — combine to delightful effect in “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” the weird and weirdly transfixing entertainment having its premiere here at American Repertory Theater.

DOUBLE UP: Taylor Mac and Mandy Patinkin make a great comedic team in ‘The Last Two People on Earth.’

When a flood of epic proportions wipes out all but two scraggly survivors, played by Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac, there is very little left for them to do but sing and dance. In fact, that’s pretty much all they do as THE LAST TWO PEOPLE ON EARTH.

The Epic Begins: Suzan-Lori Parks Traces The Legacy Of Slavery And The Civil War At A.R.T.

It’s not every play with major social themes like this one that could metaphorically mix the classical with the clowning as successfully as this work, and it’s not every playwright who could carry this off with such fearless focus and energy. Parks knows her sources well and utilizes them with all the aplomb and dexterity of a master juggler with a firm eye on the jugular. Pity the temerity of a theatergoer who’s unwilling or unable to surrender to the almost-lost art of storytelling at its purist.