The facts are as sparse as they are mysterious: One morning, just before show-and-tell time, an instructor in a small suburban grade school left her students momentarily to retrieve her autoharp from the faculty lounge. In her absence, an explosive device destroyed her classroom and all its occupants, reducing it to a mass of barely identifiable furniture and body fragments. America has no known enemies at this time, no terrorists phone to take responsibility for the devastation, and the investigators are puzzled…even more when they discover a packet of preserved flesh amid the debris, along with shrapnel indicating that the bomb was a land mine manufactured in the U.S.

Fans of the television series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, will see in Anthony Clarvoe’s 1992 Show And Tell an intriguing police procedural, with scientists and witnesses banding together to reveal the culprit. But Clarvoe is not interested in the whos and hows of this disaster, but in the survivors’ reactions, making his characters less a community of individual personalities than a panel of representative points-of-view. We have the bewildered parent confronting the transformation of her grandchild’s drawings into memorabilia, the angry parent who questions God’s justice in taking innocents untimely, the grief-stricken mother who must be sedated, the beer-swilling father who insists on claiming what may be left of his son. The bomb squad likewise follows symposial formulas…Sensitive Seth, Unemotional Iris, Capable Sharon and Naive Ann. At the center of it all is Miss Corey, the teacher almost too eager to accept the blame for everything…especially since she suspects that she may have played a part in precipitating the tragedy.

Staged in conjunction with Circle Theatre’s “Underground Circle” series, the production suffered somewhat from first-night awkwardness, rendering Clarvoe’s narrative architecture more obvious than one would have wished. Under Brett Kashanitz’ direction, however, the mostly young actors search their literary dialogue for subtextual nuance sufficient to maintain suspense and interest until the Big Revelation (hint: the fatal homework assignment was for each pupil to bring an artifact from their grandparents’ time) has been discussed in thorough detail. Their efforts make for a satisfying, if not yet fully realized, evening of sociological contemplation.