The patio of what Carter W. Lewis' "Evie's Waltz" calls Clay and Gloria's "middle class suburban home" is just a little seedy. The door and the window need painting, and the propane canister for the gas grill is rusting away. It's a fitting image for Clay and Gloria even though they find themselves - and their son Danny - deep in a crisis that will test the resilience of their marriage and suggest some dark (though hardly new) truths about being a post-Columbine American adolescent.

Now at Geva Theatre Center's Nextstage, the play begins with the married couple's waltz of familiar steps and rhythms. Their son has been suspended from school for possessing a gun, the latest in a series of escalating offenses. As always, Clay hides behind an au courant sensitivity that stops so far short of judgment that it belies the very idea of having any standards at all. Gloria is all elbows and knees, a verbal shell of sarcasm whose underlying rage reflects her confusion over what has happened to the son she "used to love." Their marriage is a series of well-tested gambits that never looks anything square in the eye.

Into this potentially violent situation comes the third partner in the dance, Danny's girl friend Evie. Though we never see Danny, it's pretty clear that both of them cultivate weirdness. A victim of verbal harassment and even beatings, Danny, with Evie's help, made drawings that signaled his intent to attack the school. Then he bought a gun on the Internet.

It's difficult to continue summarizing the plot because its melodramatic twists and turns are essential to the play's effect. Both parents are blind to their son's misery, and Evie, who will eventually say she came to help, offers instead an emotional wheelbarrow stuffed with adolescent angst, anger, and self-indulgence.

I once asked a friend who had flown in B-17s during World War II if the movie "Memphis Belle" accurately portrayed aerial combat. Yes, he said, but not all on a single mission. That's part of what's wrong with Evie. Lewis has crammed every attitude and pose, every scintilla of sarcasm, defensiveness, and vulnerability into this one teenager in an 80-minute play. The result makes for engrossing scenes, breathless confrontations - and melodramatic excess.

Even less believably, Gloria reveals everything about her resentments and her sense of loss to this infuriating - but emotionally damaged - adolescent. Evie borders on caricature, although Lewis' strong writing provides some saving grace. Although Skip Greer as Clay and Annie Fitzpatrick as Gloria have mastered the rhythms of Lewis' prose, and responded to his fine ear for not-especially-eloquent American talk, Magan Wiles can't pull off the full range of everything from scorn to sermonette that Lewis has burdened her with. Tim Ocel's direction is sympathetic and sure, and Jack Magaw's set is right on the money.

Evie's coming to talk to Clay and Gloria is a set-up, a waltz of indirection and manipulation, despite Evie's insistence that she's there to help. She is a tortured soul whose pose of adolescent wisdom treads perilously close to clich�, and the denouement becomes predictable too long before the play's final moments. When the melodrama rises, or a monosyllabic adolescent is given a set speech to mouth, you suddenly realize you're watching a literary construction rather than something that expresses the rhythms of reality. Self-destruction in a character is usually much too simple to be convincing. Despite some good writing, Clay, Gloria, and Evie just aren't interesting enough to make this everyday nightmare quite work.

Evie's Waltz

Through May 24

Nextstage, Geva Theatre, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

$30 | 232-4382, gevatheatre.org