Molly, Debra and Nicky have been holding the same monthly dinner party with their husbands for nearly 20 years. After eating, they go to the kitchen to clean up, and the guys retreat to the living room to practice their putting. It’s a little suburban, a little Stepford.

Then one night, change is in the air. At least that’s what Molly says. It could have something to do with the gun Nicky is holding. But there’s also a chill in the air – not for the women, but for their husbands, who accidentally get stuck in the meat locker in the basement. Oops, Nicky can’t find the key, and she and Molly won’t let Debra call the police. Not yet, anyway.

Leave the guys in the icebox – and start whole new lives – or let them out and face the facts that one of them is going to jail for embezzlement, one won’t have sex with his wife, and the other can’t stop having it with one of his clients?

The desperate housewives in Michele Lowe’s dark comedy “The Smell of the Kill,” running through Sunday at the Bangor Opera House, spend much of the one-act, no-intermission play grappling with that tricky, twisted question.

If the situation were reversed and the women were in the meat locker, what would the husbands do, poses Nicky.

“Would he let me freeze?” replies Debra. “Probably. So what does that prove? If we leave them in there, then we’re as bad as they are.”

“I have no problem with that,” says Molly.

But wacky problems do arise, and the three-woman cast of this Penobscot Theatre Company production work out a solution that, while not for every housewife, cures a lot of marital inconveniences.

Thankfully, director Roseann Sheridan never allows the mood to become dependent on the comedic underpinnings of the story. By playing the farcical plot with a straight face, she infuses the absurdity with a sense of oddball possibility. So much so, that when Nicky tried to spray her husband’s dessert with Raid at Sunday’s matinee, one elderly woman said this in a loud whisper: “Why didn’t I ever do those clever things?”

The audience at that matinee roared during the 90-minute performance. Only two people were brave enough to give the standing O at the end, but the whole room could have stood up to applaud without feeling they were man-haters. That’s not what this work is about. It’s a dark comedy, a surreal slice of life, rather than couples therapy or moral direction.

Actors Marianne Ryan, Meagan Hawkes and Mary Proctor show off their intelligent comic agility as they take the audience through this post-dinner-party romp that is every bit as cartoonish, but more sophisticated, than an episode of “Desperate Housewives.” Offstage, their annoying husbands antagonize them with demands and cheap shots. (Mike Abernathy, Chris Newcomb and Rich Kimball perform the roles offstage.) And the boys get what’s coming to them.

About halfway through the play, when the women realize that their husbands are the ones making the banging noise coming from the cellar, it’s Proctor’s spunky Nicky and Hawkes’ droll yet ditzy Molly (think Carol Burnett) who actually hear it as opportunity knocking. Ryan’s more uptight Debra is more of a stand-by-your-man woman. The vote must be unanimous, and the wrangling begins. That’s where the gun comes in. But if you had to prepare food in Nayna Ramey’s functional yet depressing kitchen decorated in deep burnt oranges, tans and grays, you might be looking for someone to kill, too.

New York playwright Michele Lowe crafted this fast-paced story long before “Desperate Housewives” became Sunday-night TV religion for women across the country. Just as with the TV show, Lowe taps into a deeply demented and delicious undercurrent in the psyche of wives. Be honest: How many of you have ever thought, “I could just kill him?”

For those of you who haven’t felt that frustration, there’s always Debra. She asks: “People make mistakes, but do you murder them?”

Molly and Nicky have an answer that even Debra ultimately can’t refuse.

Penobscot Theatre Company will present “The Smell of the Kill” through Feb. 13 at the Bangor Opera House. For information, call 942-3333 or visit www.penobscottheatre.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.