Theater review: Kitchen Dog's 'Collapse'

Dallas — "Bridge" is one of those nouns that makes for handy metaphors, both negative and positive. People build, cross and burn bridges all the time, without having touched any part of the actual object.

When commissioned to write a play about the 2007 I-35 Mississippi River Bridge disaster in Minneapolis, Allison Moore found another metaphor in her chosen title: Collapse. Those associations are not positive. When things collapse, they fall apart: Economies, marriages, mental capacities, relationships, dreams and, yes, bridges.

The collapsing of each of those fuel, to varying degrees, the play, which is having one-third of its "rolling world premiere" at Kitchen Dog Theater, where Southern Methodist University graduate Moore is a company member (she has lived and worked in Minnesota for several years). Two other National New Play Network theaters are involved: The work debuted at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, Calif. last season, and will have a future production at Curious Theatre in Denver, Colo.

There are other collapsible things, tangible and not, referenced throughout the 80-minute play (one involves a sex addict), but Moore doesn't belabor the point. She gives us four vivid characters in a tight, funny script and uses the idea of falling apart as a motif, often in subtle ways. As for the backdrop of a major and fairly recent national tragedy, there's no capitalizing on fresh wounds. But we do feel these characters' individual and disparate pains.

David (Michael Federico) was on the bridge when it fell. Two years later, he's still afraid of heights and, naturally, bridges. His wife Hannah (Leah Spillman) is desperate for him to get the therapy he needs, and for them to put the incident behind him and move forward. It doesn't help when any motivation he might have had is hampered by the sudden arrival of her polar-opposite sister, Susan (JaQuai Wade). As Susan and David decide to spend a night drinking, they convince Hannah to go to the group support session herself, and that's where she meets the sex addict, Ted (Bill Lengfelder).

With Susan and Ted, it appears as if the play will descend into quirkier-than-thou territory, but it doesn't.

Director Christopher Carlos keeps Wade and Lengfelder grounded as recognizable and relatable characters. They even manage to keep a subplot involving the delivery of a bag to an unseen, shady character seem not out of the realm of reason.

Spillman gives one of her best performances at Kitchen Dog, playing a character who might seem more mentally stable than the other three, but could easily let little streams of insanity ooze out at any moment. As the character with post-traumatic stress disorder, Federico keeps the neuroses in check just enough. Here's a guy who used to be fully functioning as someone not afraid of the outside world, and while he has a long road ahead of him, he might get there again.

Toward the end of the play, he performs a lengthy scene hanging onto the ladder of the bridge that looms above David and Hannah's skewed abode (scenic design by Clare Floyd DeVries). The determination to enter the land of the normal again is evident.

But in Moore's world, as in the real one, "normal" might be just out of reach, if not overrated. That's a bridge that not everyone needs to cross.