Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the dust under the rug isn’t after you.

Kitchen Dog Theater closes its season with Sick, part of the Uptown company’s annual New Works Festival. The Doggies say the Zayd Dohrn play is about “a college professor [who] brings his star student home to meet his dysfunctional family – a home so obsessed with cleanliness that the real dirt lurks around every corner and behind every sentence. Toying with our post 9/11 phobias, this quirky dark comedy plays upon our fears, both real and imagined.”

Sick, opening May 30, stars company member/playwright Lee Trull, also recently named to the newly formed Dallas Theater Center troupe, and James Crawford, memorable in many roles, including playing a big baby in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. Kitchen Dog has visited this territory before, most notably in Bug, in which a man’s fear of insects symbolizes the rise of our surveillance society.

The New Works Festival is an outgrowth of the company’s membership in the National New Play Network, an association of nonprofit regional theaters who solicit new work and then share it. Sick was chosen this year to premiere at Kitchen Dog before moving on to Southern Rep in New Orleans and New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.