Finer Noble Gases WET at the Little Theatre
Through Dec 23.

Fellow Passengers Strawberry Theatre Workshop at Hugo House
Through Dec 23.

If you're a fan of Sarah Rudinoff, you'll like The Last State--but not for the reasons you think. There are no show tunes. The mugging is kept to a minimum. And to be honest, much of the narrative has a scrapbook quality that doesn't always hang together perfectly. (A stronger-willed director might have subordinated the material into a more coherent plot.) But this show tackles the emotional complexity that Rudinoff's last one-woman show, Go There, shied away from. The Last State feels unfinished, like a workshop performance--but the kind of work-in-progress you feel privileged to witness.

Go There relied on the (sometimes secret or unacknowledged) responses people had to 9/11--visceral responses that conflicted with the reaction that politicians and media outlets either assumed or, by assuming, generated. It was a smart, skillful approach to an explosive issue. Still, Go There was propelled by the way Rudinoff exploited our ideas about 9/11.

The Last State ignites its own propulsion. The ideas are familiar, but once removed. There's the moment where Rudinoff tries to explain--with an equivocal mixture of pride and chagrin--why she was never afraid to go to school on "Kill Haole [roughly, "whitey"] Day." And there's the quiet, inexorable estrangement of a daughter who clings to bourgeois comforts from her downwardly mobile mom. Rudinoff's language is at turns compactly elegant (the image of mud-caked children) and twistingly insightful (a character who owns a resort defending her exploitation of faux-authenticity). The Last State isn't perfect, but it's enormously thoughtful and bold.

Finer Noble Gases, Washington Ensemble Theatre's second show in the Little Theatre space, is being performed on an insane seven-day per week schedule. I have no idea why they're putting themselves through this, though the marathon performance calendar does clash amusingly with the thematic torpor of the play. Finer Noble Gases premiered in 2002, but it has a much greater affinity with the fears and obsessions of the previous decade. It's about a couple of East-Village slackers (remember slackers?) who pop plastic-y blue and pink pills, watch television programs about caribou, and talk about their punk band. The narrative resembles nothing so much as an after-school special turned inside out: The moral is that drugs sap you of your will and everything that makes you a man. (Except your dick, which you can use to urinate onstage in front of a paying audience.) So far, so comprehensible. But the peak of the characters' creativity comes not at the beginning of the play (so there'd be an Edenic state for the kids to degenerate from), but at the end, when they rise from their dilapidated furniture and launch into a loud (really loud) rock song.

So the play doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but this production is packed with enough smart choices that you won't really mind. The busy video projection that opens the play is shorthand for the action that filled the apartment before indolence set in. Director Marya Sea Kaminski keeps things moving at a nice clip, and the two leads (Lathrop Walker and Michael Place) do a mean flying saucer impression. To cut to the quick: When the rock is loud and the boys are sexy, how can you say no? (But bring earplugs--you'll thank me later.)

Granted, it's an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, but Strawberry Theatre Workshop's production of Fellow Passengers goes easy on the schmaltz. It's a relief to have to use your imagination to convert a creaky platform into a desolate graveyard, and to be confronted with a wooden stool in the role of Tiny Tim instead of some cherubic kid barely out of diapers. Rhonda J. Soikowski deploys her three-actor ensemble along every inch of Erin Eave's set--her staging is the most miraculous thing about Scrooge's conversion. Todd Jefferson Moore is a little too goofy to convey the malice of the early Scrooge, but Gabriel Baron is fantastic as every one of his many characters. If you insist on seeing holiday-themed theater, Fellow Passengers is the best bang for your 15 bucks.