Earnest and playful, intellectual and physical, the members of the New York-based company TEAM are an engaging bunch. The acronym stands for the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, which tells you quite a bit about their concerns and the complex way they approach them. The programme note for Architecting (a piece developed with the National Theatre of Scotland) talks about “multi-tasking between hyper-intellectual commentaries and exuberant physicality”. This roughly translates into quite a lot going on at once. And while much of it is fascinating and some of it is brilliant, not all of it is convincingly necessary: a bit less multi-tasking wouldn’t go amiss.

But the production’s themes are compelling. The company picks away at what it means to be American by linking disparate narratives, times and places through a single concept: reconstruction. Central to activities is Carrie Campbell, a New York architect tasked with rebuilding a community shattered by Hurricane Katrina. She plans to construct a TND or “Traditional Neighbourhood Development”, complete with mansion-plexes, porches and wetlands.

When she enters a local bar which is to be demolished to make way for her development, her certainties are derailed. She encounters a Lewis Carroll-like version of the Deep South. Here Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, and her flighty creation Scarlett O’Hara rub shoulders with an obnoxious 21st-century film producer wanting to do a politically correct remake of the movie, and the historian Henry Adams, among others.

The characters fight and flirt; the actors sing, dance, soliloquise and scale the set. Gradually, the disparate elements of the show, directed by Rachel Chavkin, coalesce to produce an intricate evaluation of the way America has fashioned itself and of the way history and fiction, destruction and recovery intertwine. How do we rebuild from any devastating event, the show asks, and who profits in the recovery?

At least, that seems to be the question. It is not always easy to decipher the piece, particularly in the second half, when it strains concentration by adding another couple of characters, making it way too long and busy. The company, Frank Boyd, Jill Frutkin, Libby King, Lana Lesley, Jake Margolin and Kristen Sieh, are talented, fearless and funny; the questions they raise are pertinent and weighty. But they overload their wagon on this particular journey.

Tel 0845 120 7550