‘BAD POSTURE’: IN A SLUMP AT OLIO

“Last night, I took a bunch of Quaaludes, fell back into the drum stand, but other than that, everything’s fine.”

This moment--recorded for posterity in Noreen Hennessy’s personal diary--is a fair measure of the peak excitement to be found in “Bad Posture” at Olio, a quasi-one-person show based on that diary, written, spoken and sometimes sung by Hennessy.

What she didn’t add but might have is: “So what else is new?”

The fundamental problem with “Bad Posture” (there are others) is its unremitting ordinariness.

Hennessy’s teen-age experiences in Rochester, N.Y., as a hard-living, drug-taking, liquor-imbibing, up-throwing, out-making and otherwise spoiled child of the ‘60s may be special to her. To us, alas, they are so much deja vecu.

True, there is nothing new under the sun or moon, but, as “Catcher in the Rye” abundantly demonstrated, one can elevate even boredom to undreamed of heights. It’s all in how interesting you make it. Hennessy doesn’t make it very. Her young adulthood is as stubbornly rooted in the banal as she seems determined to show us it is not.

We hear a lot about making out with boyfriend Peter in every usual locale and situation (the front porch, the kitchen table, baby-sitting, in his car). We hear about their squabbles, breaking-up and making-up, the advent of other guys, of drugs, of alcohol, but the format never deepens or coalesces.

“Bad Posture” is the fragmented tale of Noreen’s (Nini’s) coming of age without a single trait to make it rise above a thousand others. As structured (though, one strongly suspects, not as lived), there is no maturation and not much continuity. It is a paradoxically bright-eyed, bushy-tailed account of some rather undistinguished sleeping around without much coming around the morning after.

Writing is at the heart of any piece of this sort and nothing here makes the language stand out.

Director Tony Abatemarco (also funny in a bit as Noreen’s turbaned alter-ego) is unable to blow real life into this piece, in spite of the addition of two other actors (Craig Seeley and Mari Scott) who take on various characters in Noreen’s life. They are artificial devices whose occasional interpolations remain interpolations.

Only once does Hennessy hit a living nerve--in her description of playing, at the age of eight, with two little neighbors named Michael and Steve.

When Hennessy repeats Michael’s nostalgic childhood whisper, delivered years later, “Where that girl with the piggy tails go?,” she has all-too-briefly locked on to the scent of something haunting and absolutely genuine.

Where did that girl with the piggy tails go--and why won’t she stand up and be counted? Hennessy may think she wants to tell us all about herself, but she probably doesn’t, because, in two hours of nonstop chatter, she does a superlative job of avoiding the subject. Her repetitive surface anecdotes act as the perfect smoke screen. They effectively conceal the inner journey traveled by the soul.

In the end we come away knowing only two things: that Nini is a fundamentally sweet kid and that there is no show here.

Performances at Olio, 3709 Sunset Blvd. run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. until Nov. 29; (213) 667-9556.