"Bunny Lake Is Missing," at the Brick Theater There's something perhaps inadvertently timely about "Bunny Lake Is Missing," now at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This stage noir, about a single mother's desperate search for her 3-year-old daughter after she disappears from nursery school, speaks to parental anxiety in an age when child abuse seems rife. The play - based on Evelyn Piper's 1957 pulp mystery (the source for Otto Preminger's 1965 screen adaptation) - derives tension from its resonant, inescapable subtext. Blanche Lake (Victoria Anne Miller) arrives at a New York school to pick up her daughter, only to be informed by teachers (Olivia Baseman and Vanessa FitzGerald) and a principal (Josephine Cashman) that the child was never enrolled there. Suspected of being a delusional hysteric, Blanche is referred to a sympathetic psychologist (Ken Simon, the show's producer, playwright and, with Patrice Miller, co-director). But when all avenues prove fruitless, she turns to a writer friend (Walter Brandes) as the question of her sanity looms ever larger. As Blanche, Ms. Miller conveys an agitated fragility, though her fevered stress and eventual rage take a while to build in a show that runs barely an hour. Ms. Cashman, as the stonewalling principal, suggests menace but lacks the outsize, almost caricaturesque dimensions often required of noir's supporting players. As the haughty writer, Mr. Brandes is better at conveying sinister undertones. Justin R. G. Holcomb makes a fine police lieutenant. Candace Lawrence's and Alaine Livingston's costumes nail the "50s aesthetic, while Amanda Woodward's lighting nicely evokes noir's long shadows and high-contrast palette. The ace here is Chris Chappell, whose sound design, including the lean, metronomically propulsive score, really raises the temperature. Overlapping, disembodied voices aggravate Blanche's mental state - and, effectively, the audience's.