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Dale Dunn's new play "Body Burden" promises to be thought-provoking and unsettling.

It may very well jar its audience members with revelations. But director Lou Clark hopes it doesn't answer all their questions.

"I hope audiences want to ask more questions after seeing it," she said. "I hope audiences will raise questions about politics and current events that affect their lives."

"Body Burden" is set in the present. It tells the story of Katie Pendleton, who, as the play opens, is returning from San Francisco to her native Los Alamos in an effort to pick up the pieces of her broken life.

Katie has just won out in her battle against thyroid cancer but at the price of the life of her unborn child and at the cost of her marriage. Now, she's looking in her childhood home for answers to why things turned out so badly for her.

"She doesn't have a clue," Clark said of Katie. "This play is a story about discovery. Dale (Dunn) is asking the audience to make discoveries with Katie."

Playwright Dunn, like Katie, was born in and grew up in Los Alamos. She worked in theater in New York, where her early plays were produced off-Broadway and at Columbia University, from which she earned a master's of fine arts degree.

Dunn then worked in script development for several movie studios in Los Angeles before moving into journalism. She lives in Santa Fe now.

"Body Burden" was inspired by Dunn's research into the development of the atomic bomb and, in particular, with her findings about radiation experiments scientists conducted on Los Alamos children in the 1960s.

Are those experiments at the root of Katie's crumbling life? Maybe her divorced parents know the answer. But are they strong enough to face the truth much less reveal it.

The one true thing in Katie's life may be David Lucero, the San Ildefonso man who has admired Katie since they attended high school together. He'll help Katie, but how much can he do by himself.

Fortunately, Katie is also aided by a 12-year-old Girl Scout who arrives in Los Alamos via time travel from 1966 Toledo, Ohio, and also by the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer, who had been the director of the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos.

That's right. This play just shifted from the real to the absurd. That's what director Clark likes most about it.

"We are in the present and confronting Katie's story through these out-of-time characters," she said.

Clark said the blending of realism and absurdism reminds her of playwright Sam Shepard's work.

And balancing the real and the unreal, she said, has been an incredible challenge but also a lot of fun.

"It's been such an adventure doing this," Clark said. "The key to balancing realism with what I call the otherworldliness of the play is the transitions between the scenes."

She worked closely with set and lighting designer Leonard Madrid and sound designer Clareann Despain to accomplish that. Sound and light cues involving wind, a loud blast and more wind fill the space between the real and the unreal.

"The actors move with the wind and stop and react to the blast," Clark said.

Clark graduated recently from the University of New Mexico's MFA dramatic writing program. She writes plays and specializes in directing new plays.

She said her cast has embraced Dunn's play as enthusiastically as she has, and that's important because the play has evolved into something much different from the one the actors first read.

Dunn attended rehearsals and did rewrites based on her interaction with Clark and the cast.

"That's why I find new plays more stimulating, because you can go through the process with a living playwright instead of getting the Samuel French version," Clark said. "The actors all became active participants in the development of this play by asking questions."

And that's what "Body Burden" is all about.