Fourth Grader Disappears; Exotic Quest Ensues "Bureau of Missing Persons," a new play by Lila Rose Kaplan, is sprinkled with bits of absurdity and magical realism and other charms. But the whimsical frills ultimately do not make up for the underwritten characters, who remain disconnected from one another and ultimately from the audience too. Angela (Maren Bush), a former schoolteacher, has suffered a mental breakdown after losing one of her fourth graders on a class trip to the zoo. Unable to leave her home for over a year, she is badgered by her stuffy, uncompassionate husband (the elbow-patched Ryan McCarthy), a professor whose academic work is littered with passive-aggressive references to his frustrated personal life; her caricature of a critical mother (a be-pearled and French-twisted Pamela Shaw), who wants more than anything else for Angela to comb her hair and put on a dress and some lipstick already; and Patrice (the pixielike Lucy DeVito), a mystical interior decorator who likes to read the obituaries and crush autumn leaves with her bare hands. In dreamlike sequences that exist somewhere between unwitting delusions and deliberate imaginings, and in which the realness of any and all characters is constantly in doubt, Angela bonds somewhat haphazardly with a kindergarten teacher (an ingenuous Neimah Djourabchi) who says his wife is missing. They go on an improbable adventure that takes them to an abandoned cave in Moscow. The whole play feels a lot like improv actors playing the game "Yes, And" - in which one character states a plot development or premise that is totally outlandish, and the others have no choice but to accept the assertion and build on it. This plot framework, which can stunt character development, nonetheless works enchantingly well from a production design perspective: every major surface of the set (by Moria Sine Clinton, who also created the costumes) is a giant green chalkboard, and the actors frequently draw on it to create new set pieces - window curtains, a fireplace, a pot of stew, jungle vines. Sometimes the chalked additions are supposed to be real and sometimes not, but usually, as with everything in this disorienting show, they are somewhere in between.