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It’s right there in the script of Francis Beaumont’s “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” a tricksy, loopy, wildly self-referential 1607 play that parodies both city comedy and chivalric romance.

This is unfortunate in an otherwise meticulously calibrated production, exquisitely lit by David Finn on a tricksy set whose surface transforms from water to stone to wood, not a whit of it digital.

Psychological coherence takes a back seat to tricksy plotting.

She keeps the Polaroid picture of herself and her friends, taken by a tricksy hitchhiker in the 1974 film, on her dashboard visor.

Besides being a deliciously sardonic tale of reversals and comeuppance, “Ezra Slef” pays deft homage to Nabokov, Borges, Flann O’Brien and numerous other tricksy writers.