Bollin, a notorious serial killer, is welcomed by his potential victims with increasingly open arms; as his fame grows via unrelenting tabloid coverage, so does the public's desire to submit to him. There's no fear of the madman in their midst, because the people, it seems, are even madder than he is.

And yet his methodical attention to procedure (labeled "a systematizer," he records the details of each murder) is thwarted by his victims' enthusiasm: Throughout the course of his Everyman-like travails on stage, he manages to kill exactly no one, though the survivors of his attempts can perhaps catalog his successful past kills even better than he can. Meanwhile, he is trailed by two children who possess even less conscience than he does. If the children are our future, for Grass that future is bleak indeed.

Mister, Mister's set (designed by Andrew Thompson) echoes the German obsession with order. Three plain, off-white walls are marked with a series of simple compartments, each lettered, in simple, sans-serif Ikea style, with the German name of its contents. "Bett" folds out into a Murphy-style bed. "Badewann" contains a bathtub. It's a handy parallel, since Ikea's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, like Grass, was a member of his nation's Nazi youth movement, and like Grass (who as a teen joined the Waffen-SS), hid that affiliation until recent years.

With so much to consider in Grass' heavy-handed but compelling parable, it's too bad that director Rich Rubin has only a half-successful cast. Still, Ian Boston McCafferty's forest ranger Greensward and Katie Gould and Robert DaPonte's bratty Sprat and Slick turn in performances strong enough to carry their lesser stagemates. As the production's immoral center, Robert Ian Cutler starts off with a modulated Bollin, but hits his peak too early. By the end, he's more exhausted than engaging. However, the script might be equally responsible for this burnout factor, as its point is also clear early on.

Still, Mister, Mister is a reminder that sometimes people are not at all, as another wartime teenager believed, "generally good at heart," and that occasionally, given the proper incubation, a nation's internal rot will rip through its population like Ebola. Mister, Mister isn't by any means an inoculation against this threat; consider it a public service announcement - sent by the virus itself.

Mister, Mister

Through Sunday at the Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., and Oct. 15-25 at the Shubin Theatre, 407 Bainbridge St. Tickets: $15-$25.

Information: 215-627-1088 or www.quinceproductions.com.