STAGE REVIEW : Living, Loving on a Powder Keg in ‘Nebraska’

“I had to kill my dog today,” is the unlikely opening line of Keith Reddin’s “Nebraska,” a lean and hungry play about life at the bottom of a missile silo.

This seeming disconnection between a spoken line and a play’s larger intent is not accidental.

Reddin and “Nebraska” specialize in being indirect--a behavior characteristic more commonly known in today’s psychological circles as avoidance or let’s pretend this isn’t really happening.

What isn’t supposed to be happening is not the death of a dog but the possibility of nuclear extinction. “Nebraska” (which opened Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse) is set on a Midwestern Air Force base where intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept, encased in silos 70 feet underground. They are our answer to nuclear attack. “Enabling” them is the final resort in a final solution (or dissolution). For that reason it takes a complex number of steps to launch them. And the men condemned to learning these steps by rote as well as enduring 24-hour watches in the void of these living tombs are also trained to consider this numbing inactivity an honor.

One of these men is Dean Swift (Rob Knepper), who reminds his erring wife, “I’m in the Air Force , Julie. It’s not work .” So what is it?, asks Julie (Barbara Howard).

Duty, replies Swift.

If, suggests Reddin, you want to know what the permanent vacuum of this brinksmanship, this perpetual readiness for the Apocalypse, does to people, watch and listen.

Watch Swift and his wife avoid their feelings and talk about dogs and driving and wallpaper.

Watch Swift’s commanding officer, Gurney (James Rebhorn), fight impotence and boredom by trying (ineptly) to be one of the guys. Watch him heap unmerited praise on his flirtatious, philandering wife, Carol (Robin Bartlett). Watch him fiddle with Wagner while Carol does a slow burn.

Watch Swift and his partner, Fielding (Adam Coleman Howard), in a walking cartoon of the self-proclaimed happy single) talk--or not--in the treacherous emptiness of that “duty” 70 feet under.

Watch and listen to Kim (Susan Berman), the radar specialist, and Barnes (John Cameron Mitchell), the mindless clerk, interact with some or all of the above at the bar on base--or at the dismal cookout Gurney dreams up to boost morale.

Watch and listen to everyone sooner or later betraying everyone else, as the senses derail trying to cope with the barrenness of the mind and the endless Nebraska plain. In time, adultery, alcoholism and subtler forms of brutishness mushroom all over the landscape.

It’s a chilling view: sour, dangerous, provocative and surprisingly funny. Director Les Waters (who has staged other Reddin plays elsewhere in the past) knows how to be faithful to his playwright’s motives while at the same time creating an unexpected amount of suspense.

The company is exceptionally well chosen. Bartlett as Carol is ironic and quite wise without becoming bitter. Rebhorn’s Gurney is a tragically well-meaning man, so overwhelmed by his feelings of inferiority that he’s unable to coherently complete a sentence.

Coleman Howard as Fielding has all the attributes of a scoundrel thinly disguised as a harmless happy-go-lucky bachelor.

But it is ultimately Knepper’s Swift who is the centerpiece of the play. He is the prototypical tragic hero whose rude awakening we follow, from the well-meaning serviceman he once was to the corrupted husband and officer he has so imperceptibly become.

Mitchell, Berman and Barbara Howard contribute clearly defined supporting characters.

Costumes, lighting and sound (David C. Woolard, Stephen Strawbridge and John Kilgore, respectively) are unobtrusive. Designer Loy Arcenas’ set of all-encompassing concrete conveys the suffocation of arid entombment in the silo control center while smoothly transforming into a variety of other locales--a bar, a motel, an office and two homes.

But it is the unlikely marriage of text (the perpetual deathwatch) and subtext (the profound unhappiness, boredom and waste it engenders) that has a gathering power. Reddin has turned a neat trick: He has issued a stern warning with a play that never stoops to preach.

At the Warren Theatre on Gilman Drive on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Special “pay-what-you-can” matinee this Saturday only. Ends July 30. Tickets: $18-$25; (619) 534-3960.