The downtown actress Hannah Cabell is a whiz at physical comedy, especially when it’s driven by manic desperation. This comes in handy in Allison Moore’s new play, “Collapse,” in which her character — also named Hannah — spends a lot of time running around like a spastic gerbil.
Hannah just can’t get a break. Her Minneapolis law firm is downsizing, and she fears she may be the next to go. Her husband, David (Elliot Villar), was caught in the 2007 collapse of the I-35 Bridge; while he made it out alive, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder two years later, and has stopped going to work. Despite all this, they’re still trying to have a baby.
To complicate things further, Hannah’s dippy sister, Susan (Nadia Bowers), shows up on their doorstep unannounced. She brightly announces that she’s moving back because she lost her job in Los Angeles and was evicted from her apartment. Oh, Susan also got a free plane ticket by agreeing to deliver a mysterious package to a dude named Bulldog.
Hannah is a responsible, high-strung type, and Cabell, who played the Joyce DeWitt-like role in the “Three’s Company” satire “3C,” gives her an amusing frantic energy. Hannah tries to do too much, preferably all at once, and in that she’s like the show itself.
The playwright keeps piling on the misunderstandings and coincidences, no matter how far-fetched. Hannah meets an impotent sex addict named Ted. Fine, why not? Since the smooth-voiced Maurice McRae makes Ted sound like a late-night DJ on a quiet-storm station, you can see why Hannah would be tempted. But her mistaking him for Bulldog stretches credibility.
You also wonder why David only pretends to be an alcoholic — he doesn’t actually drink because beer stirs up his ulcer and wine gives him headaches.
Moore’s knack for wacky situations will serve her well if she ever decides to work in sitcoms — this isn’t a put-down, by the way. And director Jackson Gay (also of “3C”) keeps the pedal to the metal, as if hoping that everything will rush by in such a blur that we won’t notice the plot holes.
Too bad the show takes a turn for undeserved human-interest pathos at the end. To nobody’s surprise, David and Hannah somehow end up back on the fateful bridge — cleverly rendered by set designer Lee Savage as an inclined scaffold-like plane.
“Things collapse,” David says then, spelling things out for the two people still in the dark. “Bridges. Companies. Marriages.”
So do plays.