By Aaron Bushkowsky. Directed by Sarah Rodgers. A Solo Collective Theatre production. At Performance Works on Friday, November 13. Continues until November 29

Have you ever bored yourself with a dream? If not, and you want to find out what it’s like, try watching Aaron Bushkowsky’s Dressing for a Wedding.

In the local playwright’s latest script, Carolyn, who is directing the rehearsal for her daughter Dee-Dee’s wedding, quickly establishes herself as the mother from hell, saying to Dee-Dee, “You will have the wedding I never had or I will kill somebody.”

The trope of the overbearing mom is tired and most of the jokes in this comedy are insults. The best comes—and keep in mind that this is the best—when Carolyn complains about Dee-Dee’s dress: “Since your waist is the same size as your shoulders, you look like toothpaste.” Most of the time, the meanness isn’t fancied up with anything like wit. “Don’t touch me,” Carolyn says to her hapless husband, Bob. “Your hands feel like salad tongs.”

Eventually a story about Dee-Dee’s absent older sister Carly emerges. That story, which I won’t give away, is tragic. Since it’s told with little specificity, it’s also generic.

The baseline for the current reality in the script is never clear: the characters just wander around and free-associate scenes with one another. They reenact a family vacation in Mexico, for instance, and we see a date in which Carolyn and Bob went skating when they were young. Are we inside Carolyn’s head? One thing’s for certain: nobody does any of the things you do at a real wedding rehearsal: in this production, Carolyn wastes a lot of time arranging and rearranging chairs for no apparent reason. Wherever we are, a catharsis eventually arrives, but it has been preceded by so little meaningful development that it feels unearned.

Under Sarah Rodgers’s direction, Deborah Williams delivers a nicely timed, heartfelt performance as Carolyn. Playing Seth, the groom, Josh Drebit gets stuck in muscle-bound, automaton shtick that isolates him in his own stylistic world.

Fortunately, the physical production is winning. The resourceful set designer Yvan Morissette delivers a vision made out of white paper that ends up being part chapel, part wedding dress, and a whole lot frothy wedding cake. Emily Cooper pours gorgeous projections over it, especially in the final cue, in which giant purple flowers spread and bloom.