The fever syndrome referred to in Alexis Zegerman’s new play is a rare auto-inflammatory condition that recurrently engulfs the body in a debilitating and potentially dangerous high temperature. The result of a genetic anomaly – an immune-system quirk possibly designed to help ward off bubonic plague – it afflicts a 12-year-old girl called Lily, who, some way into the evening, distressingly convulses on the living-room floor of a Manhattan brownstone.

By this point in the play, Lily’s medical upset perhaps denotes psychological overload too. She’s the youngest member of a clan that has dysfunction in its DNA. With Robert Lindsay taking the patriarchal lead of Richard Myers, in Roxana Silbert’s production, you might be tempted to draw parallels with his uptight dentist dad in My Family. But sitcom laughs here are few and far between.

The Myers family has convened to celebrate the handing of a Lasker award (real thing, given for excellence in medical science) to the seventysomething paterfamilias, an eminent geneticist. Instead of slaps on the back, though, disgruntlement is the order of the day. The careerist kingpin, ailing with Parkinson’s, is facing the music of poor parenting.

His pioneering steps with IVF have resulted in thousands of babies. But his daughter Dot – Lily’s mother – feels as if she never got her due of attention and has brazen designs on her truculent old man’s inheritance, mistrustful of his third wife Megan, a fussily devoted carer. Her younger twin half-brothers, Thomas and Anthony, are at the biting point of need and resentment too.

The provenance of this sprawling American family drama hits you with the force of a lobbed set-text. Whether it’s Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or August: Osage County, Zegerman is following in some mighty footsteps. Irascible-forgetful and starting to hallucinate Dot’s childhood self, the Prof is almost a mutation of Miller’s Salesman Willy Loman. But the sequencing of the piece feels too neat, as if lab-engineered.