The concept of illness as metaphor has long been a fertile area for playwrights, the latest example being Obie Award-winner Adam Bock’s (The Receptionist, The Thugs) A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons. Tracking the physical disintegration of a vibrant woman who loses her senses one by one, the drama fails to capitalize on its provocative premise.

Emily (Michelle Pawk) is a successful contractor whose professional competence is indicated by her easygoing rapport with her burly foreman Billy (Victor Williams). But she seems less than satisfied in her marriage to the mild-mannered John (Reed Birney), and her relationship with her grown daughter Jenny (Celia Keenan-Bolger) is fraught with tension.

The trouble begins when Emily nearly starts a fire because she’s unable to smell a burning towel. It soon becomes apparent that she’s lost her sense of smell. This is quickly followed by the succeeding losses of taste, sight and hearing. Before long she’s reduced to sitting forlornly on her couch, still able to speak while others can communicate to her only via squeezing her hand.

The problem with the play is that Bock provides neither the texture for it to succeed as naturalism nor the poeticism to infuse his central character’s plight with sufficient resonance. Although there are moments that are quietly moving—such as when Emily informs her devoted husband, “I didn’t love you…but I love you now”—for most of the brief, 80 minute running time it feels like a mundane domestic drama that has been artificially inflated with its high-concept mysterious illness.

Under the direction of Trip Cullman, the excellent ensemble delivers sensitive portrayals that help flesh out their thinly written characters. Pawk is so charismatic in her early scenes that her character’s progressive deterioration becomes deeply tragic. Birney is very touching as the pained husband who discovers his inner strength; Keenan-Bolger well suggests the complexity in the prickly daughter who tries to provide her mother with loving support; and Williams is wonderfully natural as the good-natured Billy.

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.