STAGE REVIEW : RICH KIDS RUNNING ‘OUT OF GAS’

Grouper and Myst have driven to the top of a high hill on the night of their graduation from a New England boarding school for students with behavioral disorders.

She’s the daughter of a rock star. He’s the son of a senator. Both have been severely damaged by the neglect of their self-involved parents. Even though they have each other, their misery is so great that they’ve come to the end of the line in their desire to live any longer.

Playwright Mark St. Germain has set himself an unusual task in “Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap” (having its West Coast premiere at the Coast Playhouse)--how do you deal artfully with the lives of spoiled and miserably unhappy rich kids?--and he hasn’t solved it. St. Germain has a good ear, and he sees how the high energy of youth can mask deep confusion and despair.

But when Myst, late in the play, reveals that she’s pregnant and adds, “I would’ve had a D and C this week except for graduation, parties and packing,” you know you’re dealing with a certain mentality.

“Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap” describes a new genre, post-kidvid theater. Grouper’s cruelest memory about himself is when he was a party to a friend’s humiliation that was so great that the friend could no longer wear his Superman suit. Myst’s darkest crime was replacing the Vaseline in the jar at her concupiscent mother’s bedside with Vick’s VapoRub.

St. Germain seems half-infatuated with their kickiness (grass, coke and plenty of beer are brought to the party, and Myst is bent on seducing Grouper--sex is her weapon. We are a long way from “Our Town”). How wisely they understand their parents’ suffocating pretensions; how little they know about life outside their own lives. Grouper mentions the night he lifted a movie projector. “You stole it,” says Myst. “Borrowed,” he replies. “It’s not stealing until they catch (you).”

There’s a powerful story here about kids who have become lost, and violently troubled. But it’s buried in the banality of these characters. You can speculate all you want on the sociology of materialism and neglect that has turned hordes of kids loose in their own anarchy, which they throw back on their surroundings. But these characters, because they’ve been taken so much on their own terms, are relentlessly uninteresting. This is to the literature of pain in the theater what Soul Train is to dance, a combination of energy, repression and ignorance that’s ultimately unrevealing and deadening.

Jami Gertz comes off a good deal slighter and more nondescript onstage than on camera, but her Myst is full of spiky intensity, and when she finally lets herself go with Grouper (well past the sex part), she shows the subtle shift of a character regressing to a softer childhood. Jason Patric has more trouble with Grouper, if only because the character is less well developed. He has physical intensity, but there’s not much going on inside.

There isn’t much subtlety to this work. If the emotional volume of “Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap” were turned down occasionally, we might be more inclined to listen.

The production values are excellent. Michael Devine designed the set, Madeline Ann Graneto the costumes, Greg Sullivan the lights and Jon Gottlieb the sound. Lee Shallat directs.

Performances Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays 7 and 9:30 p.m., with Sunday matinees, 3 p.m., at 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (213) 650-8507, through July 13.