Forget being upside-down on their mortgage. This clan of Georgia sharecroppers – a family that would be dirt-poor if only they had the good fortune to own the dirt they live on – inhabits a shack that looks ready to slide sideways right into the soil.

In “Tobacco Road” at La Jolla Playhouse, that sense of being swallowed up by poverty and hopelessness hangs over all. For the Lesters and those in their orbit, the prospect of being laid to rest in a pretty dress or presentable suit is what passes for a bright future, and even a house can seem to slouch toward suicide.

Naturally, then, the play is a comedy.

That's a little too simple. Jack Kirkland's 1933 stage adaptation of the lurid Erskine Caldwell novel, now getting a vivid and visceral staging at the Playhouse, is like a burlesque of a domestic drama. The Lesters are constantly flaunting their basest impulses – lust, greed, dishonesty, utter cruelty to each other.

The laughs come partly from seeing how these characters justify all that nasty behavior to God and neighbor. But the play also bristles with a more uncomfortable kind of humor, like a cold splash of water from the rusty hand pump that sits at stage front.

It's based in a tacit understanding of how easily economic desperation can strip away the sheen of civilized behavior, and (in some ways) how thin the line is between the Lesters and anybody not named Bill Gates.

Or maybe it just seems that way right now, with the economic nausea brought on by our own vanishing housing wealth, a staggering stock market and credit as hard to come by as a scrap of turnip at the Lester place.

DETAILS “Tobacco Road” La Jolla Playhouse When: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.; through Oct. 26 Where: Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive Tickets: $29-$62 Phone: (858) 550-1010 Online: lajollaplayhouse.org

All the talk of our current straits being the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression makes the Playhouse and its artistic director, Christopher Ashley, seem pretty prescient in reviving “Tobacco Road,” a play that's rarely staged these days. Not only does it ring some familiar bells (or knells) – the Lesters are losing their property to foreclosure, for example – but it premiered on Broadway in the early years of the Depression.

It might seem the last play people would have paid to see in a time of such abject misery, but “Tobacco Road” ran for some seven years, and remains the 15th-longest-running show in Broadway history (just ahead of the still-running “Mamma Mia!” whose focus on poverty is limited to the artistic type).

To Jeeter Lester (John Fleck), the head of the play's crumbling clan, the endless troubles are all part of God's law, a belief that helps get this opinionated but indolent dreamer off the hook for his own shortcomings.

“Seems a man can't have no goods anymore,” Jeeter laments in his scratchy drawl, sitting on the porch near the play's beginning. Fleck plays him with a raw, crocodile charm – Jeeter seems unruffled by anything, and the only thing that really gets him up on his feet is his vague, disappearing vision of holding onto his land.

Meantime, his family is splintering more quickly than their dilapidated house. Only two of the 17 Lester children remain, and their matriarch, Ada (played to dry, dissolute perfection by Jan Leslie Harding), admits she doesn't know whether the rest are alive or dead.

Dude (Sam Rosen), 16, is occupied mostly with cruelly mocking his parents and seeing how filthy he can get his overalls. Rosen conveys an elemental sense of the character's empty-headedness; the decades of hardship clearly have produced a bumper crop of apathy in this family, and Dude is the prize pick.

He's soon descended upon by Sister Bessie (audacious and funny Catherine Curtin), a “lady preacher” with more on her mind than the Lord's work. She lures Dude into a quickie marriage by buying a new car, the better (so she says) for them to spread the Gospel. All he wants to do is honk the horn; all she wants to do is get her hands on him.

Daughter Ellie Mae, who's 18, is meanwhile stuck at the homestead; her harelip seems to have scared off potential suitors. In probably the bravest, most committed (and most difficult to watch) portrayal, Kate Dalton's Ellie Mae can barely suppress her own raging lust, rubbing up against just about any man who comes near.

That includes Love (a memorable Chris Reed), the (somewhat) gentle giant of a man who has married her young sister, Pearl (Mary Deaton, good in a limited role), but can't get her to sleep with him. Meanwhile, the family's grandma (the affectingly hobbled Lucy Ann Albert) is treated like the family dog – or worse – as she wanders about. In one of the more memorable visual elements, the walls around the house simply fall down as she totters off into the great beyond.

David Schweizer directs with a rich, often disturbing sense of this seemingly cursed family's faults and desperation (though his technique of placing some of Jeeter's speeches in semi-blackout feels a little arbitrary and unnecessary at times). David Zinn's devolving scenery and dingy costumes capture the feel of a place turning to dirt before our eyes. Shahrokh Yadegari's twangy musical cues inform and rarely intrude.

Fleeting moments of tenderness cast the Lesters' enduring misery in bold relief in this still-pungent play. It's hard not to laugh at some of their more absurd actions. It's also hard not to pause a time or two, wondering how you'd do in their sorry shoes.

  

Writer: Jack Kirkland, based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell. Director: David Schweizer. Sets, costumes: David Zinn. Lighting: Christopher Akerlind. Music, sound: Shahrokh Yadegari. Cast: John Fleck, Sam Rosen, Jan Leslie Harding, Kate Dalton, Catherine Curtin, Mary Deaton, Chris Reed, Lucy Ann Albert, Jesse MacKinnon, Josh Wade, Joel J. Gelman.