A joke making the rounds in Harare, Zimbabwe:

A man on the way home from a petrol run is caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. A stranger taps on his car window. Cautiously, he rolls it down and asks what he wants.

"President Mugabe was kidnapped and the ransom is $50 million," the man says. "If the ransom isn't paid by midnight, the kidnappers have threatened to douse him with gasoline and set him on fire. We're taking up a collection. Do you wish to contribute?"

"How much are folks donating?" the driver asks.

"Oh, about five to 10 liters," the stranger says.

This joke does not appear in Quantum Theatre's masterful production of Fraser Grace's "Breakfast With Mugabe" now playing at Piatt Place, Downtown. There aren't any jokes in Grace's cerebral but emotionally accessible play. Still, the playwright's sardonic humor courses through it like a subterranean river of death, reminding us that when it comes to dictators, irony, banality and tragedy swim in the same waters.

The first thing the audience notices is that "Breakfast With Mugabe" is full of ghosts, haunted like Shakespeare's plays by spirits. It opens with the arrival of Dr. Andrew Peric (Ezra Barnes), a white psychiatrist summoned to Mugabe's palace to help him deal with an ngozi, according to the Shona religion, a spirit who has died a violent death.

Peric must first run the gantlet of Mugabe's young second wife Grace (Rebecca Thomas) and suspicious bodyguard Gabriel (Gregory Mikell). Both are dangerous, but Grace's mix of flirtatiousness and menace rivets us from the start.

Peric refuses to allow her to influence the doctor-patient relationship he has yet to form with Mugabe. Their battle of wills is a prelude to his struggle with Mugabe himself.

President Mugabe (Don Marshall) arrives late, starting an ongoing struggle for dominance. The strong-willed psychiatrist refuses to be bullied. The scene provides the play's only true laugh-out-loud moment, but it is also instructive of a relationship steeped in manipulation.

"I will address you by your first name, Robert," the psychiatrist says. "You will refer to me as Doctor, or if you prefer, Mr. Peric." The audience has to decide whether this is sound psychiatric protocol or the lingering unconscious white racism taken to ridiculous extremes in post-colonial Zimbabwe.

Mugabe is a haunted basket case. He believes he is being visited by the vengeful spirit of Josiah Tongogara, who died in a car accident before he was able to become Zimbabwe's first elected president. Peric picks up on Mugabe's repressed guilt as it works itself out through archetypes in the Shona belief system. As knowledgeable about this as Western psychiatry, he is empathetic instead of judgmental about the appalling actions of a ruthless dictator.

Still, Peric's moral neutrality makes the other characters suspect his motives. After all, he is a wealthy white landowner facing confiscation of his property. When Grace implies that Mugabe is more interested in a naked land grab than alleviating the suffering of the nation's black farmers, Peric tells her he has faith in the courts -- the one point where his idealism comes across as desperately stupid.

The play benefits from an excellent cast led by Marshall as the haunted but resilient dictator who rails against white colonialism while picking the nation's pocket clean. "As you know," he tells Peric early on, "the persecution of Africans cannot be limited to one lifetime." Later he roars at Peric: "White supremacy would have you believe this is how Africans live, tearing one's brother limb-from-limb." Marshall communicates Mugabe's casual menace without sacrificing his Shakespearean complexity.

Barnes is superb as Peric, modulating his moral outrage for the sake of dispassionate analysis. Thomas eats up every scene she's in as Grace, stalking the stage like Lady Macbeth on safari. Mikell doesn't get nearly enough stage time as the glowering Gabriel, but his sinister stoicism cuts to the chase, and he provides the play's one scene of violent catharsis.

Quantum stages "Breakfast With Mugabe" on the second floor of the former Lazarus department store Downtown. Designer Tony Ferrieri cleverly incorporates the building's dilapidating ring of balconies, once a symbol of the city's romance with Tax Incremental Financing, into this harrowing tale of a nation's squandered potential. OK, I know that equating Tom Murphy's TIF with Mugabe's mismanagement of Zimbabwe is grossly unfair, but symbols are symbols.

Director and company founder Karla Boos once again amazes us with a droll and erudite production that will generate spirited conversation for a long time.