Damaged goods Perishable’s Big Death & Little Death BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A pedestrian production of Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death & Little Death (through October 29) would probably come across in dreadfully bad taste. Death on the in-your-face level of an autopsy photo is no laughing matter. But Jason Nodler, Perishable Theatre’s new artistic director, has assembled a perceptive cast that nails this bittersweet play like a stake through the heart of oblivious contemporary culture.

A cursory description of the characters and their problems indicates how a superficial production could easily settle for just milking dark laughs. A soldier father returning home from Iraq becomes obsessed with photographing traffic accident victims. His son is dating his high school career counselor. The Goth-garbed daughter of the family hasn’t eaten anything for three weeks. The war vet suspects that his nervous wife had an affair while he was gone, and she gradually admits more and more, like a murderer under a dangling lightbulb.

Birnbaum likely wrote this under the influence of David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, about car crash victims who simulate the heightened experience for sexual release. (A "little death" was 18th-century code for orgasm.) In Big Death & Little Death, Tom Buckland is the returning soldier, identified only as Dad, who begins photographing mutilated bodies at traffic accident scenes. He doesn’t know why he does that, and certainly not why he eventually poses his daughter Kristi (Laurabeth Greenwald) in assorted accident victim postures after she suggests that he take a picture of her to begin a healthier photo album.

Like this family, the set design by Jeremy Woodward is cramped, modular and disconnected. Dominating, stage right, is a crushed turquoise sedan, a hole in the windshield where a driver smashed through. A living room couch, with headlights in its arms, doubles as a car in which the four take a fateful white-knuckled ride and Dad drives faster as they beg him to slow down.

As the stonily traumatized ex-soldier, Buckland might have been more effective if he maintained an underlying tension, but this blithe take is a reasonable option. Gary (Aaron Firicano) is so terrified of this unstable father that at one point he can’t bring himself to pass by the man sitting at the kitchen table to go to the fridge for a Coke. Firicano convincingly plays the boy in a near-constant state of dread relieved by bouts of mute confusion. Occasion for the latter is provided by his high school guidance counselor, Miss Endor (Nadia Mahdi), who is old enough to be his mother but is so enthusiastic about the death metal groups he loves that he accepts a concert date. (The sound design by Ché Pizarro pins us back with bursts that seem like satanic manifestoes rasped through blowtorches.) Mahdi shakes her character like a rag doll, from nihilistic joy at the music to wrenching sobs over a militant survivalist’s fetus she aborted.

The two women of the family are also walking wounded. Melissa Penick makes Mom an archetype of repressed adaptation, as written, but also gets to spread her wings when the poor woman loses it with her family and screams a lengthy anthem of stifled selfishness. Greenwald is just right as the daughter, conveying not only waiflike innocence and brooding sullenness but also a thoughtful intelligence. That last is needed when Kristi observes that since molecules of eons of our predecessors are all around us, "Every step you take, you walk on death."

Common to all those performances is skillful attention to opportunities that lie beneath the surface of these characters and create vivid presences. That also goes for two more actors. Alex Sherba plays high school friend Harley with a fascinating blend of teenage obliviousness and touching vulnerability. Peter Deffet gets to strut a range of stuff in three characters. One is gay sailor Uncle Jerry, who wastes on a monosyllabic Gary his one brief phone call from a doomed submarine, and the other is a powerfully chillingly cracker who gives Gary a handgun in exchange for some pitbull pups. (Chameleon Mark Carter is entertaining as one of them who escaped burial in the toilet bowl to return all grown up and growling menace.)

Big Death & Little Death sometimes confuses with its leaps back and forth in time and its occasional surreal scene that takes place in imagination. But if you are patient with that sort of venture, this Perishable production can be a high point of your theatergoing year. It certainly was in mine.