Vincent Kartheiser

Disgruntled youth, unlucky audience

NEW YORK — A relentlessly sordid story regarding several young Brits vaguely dreaming of stardom while scrabbling around as low-rent hookers, "Slag Heap" lives up to its bleak title.

Opening yesterday at the Cherry Lane Theatre, this play by the lower-case monikered anton dudley offers nothing new on the age-old theme of good-hearted whores who vainly yearn for a better life.

Former schoolmates Dave (Vincent Kartheiser) and Ashley (Polly Lee) are homeless chums cheerfully working the public toilets and pubs in an industrial town. Slightly more ambitious than Ashley, Dave is inspired to try the glamorous London scene by Fran (Brienan Nequa Bryant), a somewhat sleeker prostitute.

Dave’s existence mildly improves for a while on the London club circuit of the rave-crazed 1990s, but the drama ends in a welter of blood among its three principal characters as the boy moans again and again, "What have you done?"

Press materials for this production claim that the play chronicles "wounded youth born from Thatcher’s politics and the aftermath of Britain’s Industrial Revolution," but the author provides very little social context for his story. In that absence, the play pointlessly rehashes many earlier works regarding soiled butterflies fatally burning their wings with heedlessly amoral behavior.

A developing playwright, dudley is part of Cherry Lane Theatre’s "Mentor Project" and worked on "Slag Heap" with the distinguished Ed Bullins ("The Taking of Miss Jamie"). If dudley’s material is hopelessly trite, at least his structure proves less hackneyed. The two-act play does not always proceed in chronological fashion, but occasionally flashes back to disclose incidents that the characters have talked about.

Best known as Connor on the WB series "Angel," Kartheiser gets an engaging gleam in his eye whenever skinny, scruffy Dave hopes to charm someone. Bryant portrays Fran with a strong sense of assurance. Janelle Anne Robinson offers a genial turn as Fran’s blowzy sister, whose lustful itch for a teenage delivery boy (Alexander Flores) leads to tragedy. Performed with heavy provincial accents, the actors’ speech is sometimes difficult to comprehend.

Director Michael Morris and his designers occasionally lighten up the gritty, minimal environs with brightly colored lights in the club scenes. Sound designer Bart Fasbinder provides a pulsing beat that subtly underlines the play’s concluding minutes.

It’s sincerely to be hoped that the production of "Slag Heap" has been a worthwhile lesson for the playwright. It’s certainly not much of an experience for spectators.