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Better living through chemistry

Finer Noble Gases seeks a formula to restore human feeling and to re-establish communication ruptured by the demands of technology.

When Tampa native Kerry Glamsch discovered the works of playwright Adam Rapp, he was drawn to Rapp's vision of the way technology affects humanity.

"I really like Rapp's use of language and the exploration of the themes of dislocation and disassociation," Glamsch said. "I'm drawn to the question where are we going in this technologically driven world."

Rapp's latest play, Finer Noble Gases, explores the loss of human feeling in today's culture. The play tells the story of Chase (Mike Wiley) and Staples (David Black), two struggling musicians in their 30s. Their slang-filled, vernacular dialogue gradually reveals two characters immersed in watching television and taking drugs in a run-down, graffiti-covered apartment in New York's East Village.

The dark comedy is a story of drug addiction, alienation, arrested development and the breakdown of community and communication.

"One of the things that concerns me in life is when you stop feeling," Rapp said from his apartment in New York.

The play gets its Florida debut in a student production, directed by Glamsch, at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Rapp, a Chicago native, started writing Finer Noble Gases in December 1999 after suffering a severe back injury. One night he noticed his roommate, a multitalented artist, sitting on the living room sofa with his hand in a bag of potato chips, watching television.

"It just dawned on me that there was a virus of inertia happening in my own apartment that included my own physical disability as well as his own spiritual and emotional one," Rapp said.

Television, he said, is a severe addiction and disease in our consumer culture. He points to television as part of the reason for our society's lack of interest in books, theater and literature.

The finer noble gases of the title refer both to "gases that do not readily attach to other elements to form a compound" and to the characters who become metaphorically a human form of these gases in their isolation from one another.

Lynch (Burton Tedesco) is the one inhabitant in the apartment who tries (by kicking in the television screen) to bring his band mates back to a cognizant, feeling reality. Speed (Spaz Walden) spends most of his time in his underwear passed out on the floor. Gray (Chris Maltezos) is desperate to feel a part of something even if the political cult he joins leads to personal tragedy. Dot (Joann Wilson) depends on the Internet for her sense of identity, but she brings hope into these men's isolated world.

"I see all the characters as wanting to belong to something," Glamsch said. "All of these characters want love or acceptance, but they are closed out and they've forgotten how (to feel) in this very technological world."

Finer Noble Gases, 8 p.m. today-Sat. and 3 p.m. Sun., then 8 p.m. Wed.-Nov. 6 and 3 p.m. Nov. 7. Theatre Centre, Studio 120 at USF, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa. $12 adults, $6 seniors and students. (813) 974-2323.