Lewis Carroll is known best as the mind behind some of the world’s most loved written works — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

The English word manipulator created worlds where nonsense reigned supreme — innocent, yet mature, alternate universes where all was not as it seemed; where up was down, black was white, and everything was topsy-turvy.

The author himself was a mirror image of his work, as he did not exist.

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a Victorian Renaissance man whose dabbles in wild literature were rivaled by forays into mathematics, religion and photography. Dodgson’s interest in the latter continues to court debate and controversy, being that his preferred photo subjects were nude, underage girls. As does his intense infatuation with Alice Liddell, the 11-year-old girl who inspired the writer’s most famous work.

Boojum! Nonsense, Truth & Lewis Carroll, the hit Australian opera currently being staged by Caffeine Theatre, the Chicago Opera Vanguard and the Chicago DCA Theater, explores the duality of Carroll’s life and unique work in grand form. Using the writer’s purposefully ridiculous epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark, as a frame and springboard, the musical production follows a motley crew — a bellman, boot-maker, bonnet-maker, barrister, broker, billiard-marker, banker, butcher, baker and beaver — as they search the high seas for the Snark — a creature both real and imaginary who terrifies them all. Oddballs amongst the misfits are a scene-stealing, flamboyant Carroll, the mousy, bespectacled Dodgson, young Alice and one Mrs. Hargreaves, who is Alice as an adult bearing her married name.

As the group meanders through the open waters, they opine, prophesize and sermonize in all manners of sung verse and dance — from swaggery dancehall ditties and extravagant showstoppers to mournful ballads — about themselves, the elusive Snark and Boojum (the Snark’s companion? Doppelganger? Both?), and the absurdities of their situation with a lyrical flourish that would make Carroll proud.

Much like the author’s work, it’s wonderful nonsense. The back-and-forth about the quest is pure fun staged on a minimalist set and costumed in rag-tag attic garb, but unfortunately it grows confusing during the two-hour running time.

The poor acoustics at The Storefront Theater, which render singing voices near indecipherable at times, share partial blame for this.

Luckily, Boojum! shines glorious when it focuses solely on the psychological mind-games between Carroll, Dodgson and the two Alices. Their relationships are erotic and innocent, loving and tumultuous, and domineering and submissive. The show mines the ambiguities wonderfully.

The brilliant casting of the four leads strengthens this nature. Jeremy Trager and Alex Balestrieri as Carroll and Dodgson, and Marielle de Rocca-Serra and Heather Townsend as Alices young and old, respectively, possess voices that perfectly complement and contrast with their characters’ other halves. It’s as if each is cut from the same musical stone, but from opposite sides.