Mtv Drama

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE

by Brad Fraser

The first thing one notices about off-Broadway's newest and best play is the audience: instead of the usual middle-agers, these spectators are young, hip, the MTV generation. They don't go to the theater very often -- a lot of them find it sedate -- but the thriller they are watching (and laughing at in all the right places) might be characterized as MTV drama. It is told in montage, in short riffs of scenes and crosscuts and simultaneous action instead of symphonic arcs of speechifying. Its characters are impeccably dressed, drop- dead cool and not very happy. The plot, like a music video, features casual nudity, simulated sex and arrestingly etched violence: a man soaked in blood from eye sockets to navel, a woman with a knife at her throat.

The underlying theme is how much easier these urban young find it to couple in the dark than to commit their hearts or even voice their feelings. A woman bluntly tells a man trying to seduce her that the romantic method won't work. The central male, informed that someone loves him, replies that no such thing exists. His best friend's mantra: "Everybody lies." To underscore the nihilism, playwright Brad Fraser, 32, interweaves teen folklore of erotic mayhem, references to AIDS and a gradual unveiling of a serial killer -- all with mordant humor (a man going to a pickup bar shouts to his female roommate, "I have a blind date with destiny!"). A hit in Fraser's native Edmonton, Alta., and in Chicago, Human Remains is not only stylistically apt and journalistically observant about its rock-and-anomie world but also deeply felt and thought. It stunningly blends punk popular appeal and poetic power.