By Serge Boucher. Translated by Shelley Tepperman. Directed by Diane Brown. A Ruby Slippers Theatre production. At Performance Works on Saturday, April 4. Continues at Performance Works until April 19, then the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts from April 22 to 25

This Ruby Slippers production of Serge Boucher’s play about murder, family dysfunction, and 9/11 could be a lot funnier.

The play is about the aftermath of tragedy. The story centres on France, who is in jail for a murder she can’t remember committing. As France slowly comes to terms with her responsibility, her family members stay in denial. France’s father insists that his daughter’s problems are all her own and that he’ll cut her off if she doesn’t get her act together. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre take place during the period of the play. Dad responds with tasteless jokes, and other family members consume the event as if it were sensational, sentimental gossip.

Empathy is an underlying theme. France’s emotions are chaotic, but she’s more generous than her selfishly consumerist relatives, who can only talk about golf, new cars, and the next trip to Florida.

The script’s comic potential lies in the juxtaposition of this darkness with the characters’ irrepressible vivacity. The balance is off from the first step of this production, however. In the opening scene, France’s sister Brigitte visits her in the slammer. As staged here, this exchange is so fraught with anxiety and interminable pauses that we see too much of the dark subtext and too little of the bubbling surface—and so it goes for much of the evening.

Actor Deborah Williams exudes buoyant irony no matter what she does, so she fares extremely well playing France’s Aunt Lisette. As France, Colleen Wheeler generously offers yet another tortured portrait. Brown demands too much torment from her, though, and I’m getting tired of seeing Wheeler as the psychiatric sacrificial lamb—a role she undertook in Influence, My Chernobyl, and 4:48 Psychosis.

With its silver accents and sliding panels, David Roberts’s two-level set is sleekly dramatic. I’m not sure that it captures the bourgeois nature of this family, but it does allow lighting designer Itai Erdal to saturate the walls in candy colours. Tim Matheson projects live black-and-white video images of some scenes onto the walls of the set. It’s creative, but sombre and alienating.

Sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe introduce each section with rhythmic scores developed from foleylike effects. Before a dinner scene, for instance, they give us a musical piece composed of the sounds of clinking plates and laughter. It’s fantastic.

This production is uniformly handsome, but it could be much more playful.