After Generic Theater Company’s performance of “Finer Noble Gases” last week, the audience was pretty enthralled, a little mystified but mostly flabbergasted.
“Finer Noble Gases” follows the story of four heavily drugged band mates living in a dilapidated East Village apartment, struggling to make it in the music industry. The performance features a series of heartbreaking, hilarious and confusing interactions between the band mates and their desperate neighbor, permeated by sequences of sinister and perplexing conversations and soliloquies about photosynthesis, UFO’s, narcotics, robots and blow-up dolls.
The performance was directed by senior Lizzie Speaker and is based on the original screenplay by Adam Rapp. The show culminates with a live rock show featuring pieces written and performed by the cast members themselves.
Sophomore Andrew Hewitt portrays the main character of the play, Chase. Though he is high on uppers and appears to be playing a game of “hot lava” by himself, unable to touch the ground and leaping from couch to chair to table, he is the script’s most sane character.
“The general gist is that these guys are so fucked up it’s funny to watch, but it’s a gradual realization that it’s not a funny thing at all toward the end,” Hewitt said. “Basically what we want from the audience is for them to feel really bad for laughing the entire time.”
Seemingly live urination, near nudity, blood-spattered clothing, knives, borderline child molestation, theft and murder leave no shortage of the sinister and the strange.
Freshman David Neiman, who portrays Staples, said he enjoyed being able to play such an offbeat character.
“For me, it’s not that big of a stretch! We worked a lot on the contrast between the uppers and the downers and got to play around a lot,” Neiman said.
The play was an exhibition on new talent, featuring actors all of whom were either freshmen or acting rookies. Youth has been a theme of student theater at GW this season – Forbidden Planet Production’s “Promises, Promises,” featured a prominently freshman casts.
