The room is a very modestly furnished kitchen: mismatched chairs around a table, a miniature refrigerator, a scruffy but cozy-looking armchair, slightly out of place. But this mundane setting is skewed at an angle onstage, as if set within a slightly tilted shoebox.
It’s just the first indication that “The Children,” a simmering, ultimately searing drama by Lucy Kirkwood about three people reckoning with the aftermath of a nuclear accident, will sketch a portrait of a dark future in which human lives may be upended (or ended) by the unexamined pursuit of technological advancement.