To call William Nicholson's "The Retreat From Moscow" a play about a family is a bit like calling Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" a play about college faculty couples.

But while Albee rips apart a longtime marriage to expose its inner lies and compromises with the enthusiasm of a chain-saw massacre, Nicholson's play explores the same territory through microsurgery. The dissection is nearly as complete, there's just less blood on the floor when it's over.

But one wonders whether the Readers Theatre production at Army Community Theatre cuts into the material with too much delicacy. We see the family falling apart, but they do it with so much control and British rectitude that the underlying emotion seems diminished.

Edward (read with almost bemused anxiety by David Farmer) has decided after 33 years of marriage that he's "on the wrong train." His wife, Alice (Jo Pruden, alternating between irony and desperation), has been coming down on him with increasing frequency, trying to force a relationship that has atrophied — "look at me," "listen to me."

Edward has become a sleeper in his own marriage, recently awakened to new possibilities by "the other woman" — the unseen Angela. When Edward tells Alice he's leaving her, she responds that he's "murdering" their marriage. When she exhausts her pleading, Alice toys with murdering herself and Edward.

The title metaphor comes from a history Edward is reading. It's a collection of diaries written about Napoleon's winter retreat from Moscow. The French troops found the city abandoned, and froze to death as they retraced their steps. Edward and Alice's marriage is similarly deserted, and their march away from "nothing" is equally destructive.

The man in the middle is the couple's adult son Jamie (a role reacted more than read by Dion Donahue). He becomes their go-between in a game of fractured communication.

Ultimately, the situation is most strongly felt by Alice, who buys a dog to ease her loneliness, names him after her estranged husband and teaches him to play dead. She also gives Edward the first draft of a poetry anthology she has collected — and the knife with which she considered suicide. Her powerlessness is her shortcut to violence, and promotes a satisfying image of Angela cleaning the mess up from the carpet.

The play's closing lines come from Jamie and sound like a eulogy. His mother has been "first among women" and his father "first among men." Jamie, 32 years old and living alone, apologizes for having been their child.

"The Retreat From Moscow" sneaks up on that chillingly despondent final tableau with dialogue that initially protests too much, then whips up an uneasy mixture of sardonic humor and desperation.

What would help this reading are a few more stiff upper cuts and less stiff upper lip.