"Trigger Kids" a solo take on young-male angst

Joe Von Appen is a Portland-based stage artist in his late 20s. But in "Trigger Kids" at Consolidated Works, he can easily pass for a scrawny teen.

That's handy, since most of the dozen or so roles he embodies in this hourlong pastiche of sardonic monologues appear to be adolescents. Make that alienated, drug-addled or just plain scary adolescents.

One of the more memorable is a guy who excitedly tells a pal how he found God. Long story short: a spree of glue-sniffing which almost landed the kid in the morgue was a big factor.

In spirit and style, "Trigger Kids" recalls the edgy evenings of portraiture crafted by famed stage soloists Eric Bogosian and Danny Hoch. In a similar vein, Von Appen offers us grim, semi-comic profiles in modern American maleness, youth division.

What's distinctive about him (and could be used more ingeniously) is the tension between Von Appen's vulnerable, choirboy looks and the hopped-up bleakness of his alter egos.

One plunges into a hot-and-heavy bout of phone sex. Another gets crazed and enraged, when he can't distinguish between real life and the images taunting him on the family TV.

Von Appen has a visceral intensity and a gift for quick-change identities. And there's a sincere social critique in "Trigger Kids," which snapshots a generation at its most clueless and spiritually lost.

But there's a tonal sameness to "Trigger Kids," and a sense that these cameos have been polished and reworked a few times too often. (Von Appen has been developing the piece for several years and performed excerpts from it here previously at On the Boards.)

While some solo actors can pull off a plotless round-up, one hungers here for even the wispiest of threads to criss-cross and connect these familiar characters in a more novel way. A way that gives us more than that ain't-it-awful feeling about wasted youth.

It might help if the vignettes built to more of a climax, or cast a wider soci-economic net. Most of these kids spout hip-hop slang and/or low-rent drawls, and appear to be lower-class and jobless.

A rare exception works as a greeter in a soul-less megastore (à la Wal-Mart). But to get that paycheck, he's had to become a human robot.

In the narrow world of "Trigger Kids," walking the straight-and-narrow and running wild are both downers. Only a near-fatal drug overdose carries the possibility for redemption.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com