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Since graduating from Harvard last year, Aucoin has been in constant motion, performing and conducting in Italy, working at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, writing a new opera for the American Repertory Theater, and serving as the composer in residence at the Peabody Essex Museum. Soon he’ll begin a two-year fellowship with the Chicago Symphony. During a rare break, Aucoin spoke with the Gazette about his life after Harvard.

Matthew Aucoin has been recently commissioned to write an opera for The National Civil War Project.

The American Repertory Theater and Harvard University are among four universities and five performing arts organizations — all of them in former Union or Confederate territory — teaming up for an ambitious project inspired by the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

As the REM song goes, “It’s the end of the world as we know it — and I feel fine.” But for the two mismatched characters in “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” life isn’t so free and easy — at least not at first —  as they deal with their last-man-standing status with song, dance and schtick. Existential angst is here performed by appealing opposites Mandy Patinkin and downtown performance artist Taylor Mac. The odd coupling works well, each playing to his own strengths in this musical two-hander that starts off twee but ends up terrific. The show will please both artists’ camps and looks promising for future engagements, but whether it crosses over to the mainstream will depend on theatergoers’ attraction to high concept and low comedy.

Patinkin and Mac share a wonderful chemistry. They’re like chalk and cheese, their differences in demeanor and energy contrasting nicely and bringing out the best in one another. The program notes tell us that Patinkin and Mac came up with the show when they realized they liked a lot of the same music.

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.