Trust

The former riot grrrl attempting a comeback meets the current heartthrob who once idolized her. The heartthrob’s fiancée powwows with her wedding-dress designer, a former roommate of the washed-up star. The two rockers go on the public-radio show hosted by the sad sack with a crush on the groupie who hangs out with the female singer. The relationships are laid out in separate but related vignettes, each one with a title as if it’s a CD track.

Though set in the rock world, Dietz’s 1992 play is a standard-issue romantic dramedy about people mistrusting themselves and others. That explains why even the rock stars—pretty-boy singer-songwriter Cody (Clayton Faits) and past-her-prime former star Leah (Anne Sheridan Smith)—sound like, well, characters in a Steven Dietz play: denizens of a falsely realized pop-culture world who can only exist in theater. Director Maher, sound designer Bill Carns and Mac Vaughey’s inventive lighting design save the playwright from his own mediocrity. Mostly, though, the efforts of the fine ensemble make the difference: Kate Cares and Brigitte Ditmars, as the fiancée and the designer, respectively, establish an appropriately uneasy rapport; Dan Granata gets to the meat of the radio host’s gimmicky monologue. The cast earns our empathy even though Dietz’s vignettes fail to build to anything—less a cohesive album than a collection of B-sides.