To say that The Velvet Rut, a new sociological satire produced by Annex Theatre, doesn't cohere is hardly a criticism; it seems to be exactly the point.

The play is broken up into four farcical fragments whose only real relation to one another is the actors they share, and perhaps, a mutual interest in splaying the guts of small-town bohemian culture all over the stage. Moving from a communal house in Battle Creek, MI, to a bus depot in Pueblo, CO, to a sound lab in Oxford, MS, to an artist's warehouse in Providence, RI, Rut presents a cavalcade of caricatures--ironicized indie rockers, a honky homeboy, a doe-eyed hippie folksinger naif, a cornpone punk poseur, a renegade ethnomusicologist, and a host of others--not so much interacting, but colliding like particles in a theatrical cylinder. Due in large part to the work of the ensemble cast (which wrote the play in collaboration with David Bucci), these collisions are often very funny, novel, and interesting. Just as often they're protracted and overstated.

Rut is overcome with details that don't really add up. You have the punk-rock girls mocking the townie hesher who starts every sentence with "fuck yeah," only moments after a would-be rapper in a superhero leotard drops Caucasian science to a camcorder documentarian, leading into a backyard wrestling match that soon gives way to a random interlude in which a cop describes an incident involving a vanload of chickens in S&M collars... and that's just the first scene. You get the feeling that this play is free to go anywhere, which it both does and doesn't do. The anarchic aesthetic winds up undermining rather than underlining the production's aims. Given a bit more focus the piece might have had an easier time identifying its targets.

One of the great challenges in satirizing popular culture is rising above easy irony. The great majority of the hipster demimonde--its starving artists and self-styled eccentrics--is already a self-parody, and a relatively sophisticated audience (the only kind that still goes to non-corporate live theater anymore) hardly needs an hour-plus theater piece to point out the hypocrisies and peccadilloes of the boho/alt world. For a play to claim this territory, it needs to raise the analytical stakes, or, even better, stop to recognize the beauty of the DIY gesture. Despite a handful of genuinely hilarious outbursts, The Velvet Rut doesn't really do either. As a result, the production often finds itself--despite an excellent cast and an absolutely fantastic set--in the troublesome position of being the very thing it seeks to lampoon.

All that said, this Rut is worth getting into, if for no other reason than to see the performance of Jonah Von Spreecken. Though I've always loved live theater, I don't see much anymore, mainly because even the so-called "fringe" seems to have hardened into a trite orthodoxy of mannered abstraction. When I do go, however, I go for the actors. People like Stephen Hando, Charles Smith, Heidi Schreck, Michael Chick, Sarah Harlett, Tina LaPlante, and a handful of others blow my mind every time, instilling a sense that live theater remains a vital form, full of the thrill that naturally follows when artists reach into themselves and dare to surprise.

Von Spreecken, in just a few local stage appearances, has joined my short list of Seattle actors whose performances make whatever show they're in a must-see. As the lead in Egguus, his comic shrewdness and youthful honesty anchored what could have been a sloppy in-joke mess. In the ensemble of Why? Why? Why? his vocal acrobatics and malleably skinny silhouette stood out masterfully among the brilliant mythological burlesque. In Velvet Rut, he gets many of the showiest roles: a redneck asshole wrestling in the backyard, a bus station punker whose pre-recorded inner monologue consists of a fake British accent that melts into Middle American self-doubt every other line (onstage meanwhile, his silent posing reveals a wounded confusion that's both hilarious and moving to see), and a monosyllabic noise rocker whose ridiculousness is matched only by his obliviousness. He shines in every last one.

I'd hate to single Von Spreecken out at the expense of the rest of the cast members, most of whom turn in inspired performances in Velvet Rut. But goddamn. A star is a star.