Home Base

It's the middle of the night, and Ruth can't sleep.

Maybe it's the decapitated birds on the roof above her rent-stabilized downtown sublet. Or the cumulative effect of a young adulthood spent traipsing from one transitory living situation to another. Or maybe it's the romantic confusion she's feeling about Astor — the best friend who just happens to be her ex-lover's brother — a young New Yorker even more transient than Ruth, who's currently sleeping on friends' couches.

Ruth's anxious peregrinations lie at the aching heart of "Hunting and Gathering," the poignant new comedy by Brooke Berman that opened yesterday at Primary Stages. Under Leigh Silverman's astute direction, "Hunting and Gathering" sketches a frank, compelling portrait of the (would-be) artist as a young Manhattanite in search of cheap rent.

There are plenty of laughs here about Craigslist and couch-surfing. But if the premise sounds small, it's not. Ruth's real estate conundrum reflects a far deeper ambivalence. Like many members of their generation, Ruth and Astor refuse to be fitted into neat slots in corporate America. The part-time jobs they are willing to do — like teaching in an after-school program — pay little and don't carry health insurance.

Yet unlike their more hard-core brethren, Ruth and Astor get jittery living on the edge. At night, they dream of a clean, affordable studio. But by day they can't bring themselves to take the jobs that would pay those Manhattan rents. Are they immature, or are they admirable?

Fidgety Ruth (Keira Naughton) is a lovable screwup. She's prone to leaping into the wrong love affairs, like her ill-fated fling with a square Columbia professor named Jesse (Jeremy Shamos). Responsible Jesse turned out to be married, and Ruth got dumped. What has lasted, surprisingly, is Ruth's friendship with Jesse's kid brother Astor (a winning Michael Chernus), a sweet, shaggy-haired hippie who works as a Man with a Van.

With his mistrust of the mass-produced and the disposable, Astor couldn't be more different from Jesse's latest girlfriend Bess (Mamie Gummer), a 20-year-old coed with a passion for Ikea. Bess, who believes that men must be trapped, is a cool-blooded huntress: After bagging Jesse, she relaxes by going to the arcade and shooting virtual buck.

"Hunting and Gathering" effectively builds the tensions among its four characters' competing moral systems. Yet it pits them against each other with a subtle hand. The dyads are constantly reforming so that, at some moments, Jesse's perspective feels more like Astor's than it does like Bess's. Throughout, there is a strong sense that much is at stake. When Ruth, tired of feeling victimized, declares she's going to mold herself into a predator, Astor recoils, insisting that life can be lived on kinder, gentler terms. It's an argument with the power to drive close friends apart, and the play makes you feel the pain of the break.

To be sure, the work is flawed. There are sections that sag a little, and the mix of monologues and two-character scenes never quite gels. The production is undeniably fortunate in its director: Ms. Silverman's punchy approach makes the most of the humor, underscoring the proceedings with a playful lilt that glosses over structural deficiencies. It would be possible to mistake "Hunting and Gathering" for another minor-key tour of Hipsterland. The set is pure downtown chic, with exposed lighting and a nifty wall of cardboard boxes stacked to evoke the Manhattan skyline. The direct-address monologue can feel excessive, with the characters sounding self-indulgent as they wax philosophical about their storage spaces and furniture purchases.

Yet despite the downtown trappings and of-the-moment references, "Hunting and Gathering" is not niche fare. Ms. Berman has crafted an intriguing present-day morality play, juxtaposing the Ikea lifestyle of conventional young adults against the rough-and-tumble existence of rebels without trust funds. In addition to being thought-provoking theater, "Hunting and Gathering" is one of the few off-Broadway plays in recent memory that is for and about the people who make the arts in New York.