From warehouse to playhouse

On Saturday, in a dilapidated warehouse in Kensington, three young people will pretend to be three other young people in a dilapidated warehouse in San Francisco.

John Rosenberg's Hannah is set in 1995, but the main characters' conversations, barring the odd mid-'90s pop-culture reference, wouldn't sound out of place today: Hip young white people discussing which inebriants to ingest, what it really means to be from a city, and what the appropriate term is for the impoverished African American neighborhood they live in.

The three characters are in their early 20s, as, it appears, is the cast. Laura Sukonick and Francesca Piccioni play two new apartment-mates, Christina and Hannah, one a spaced-out partyer, the other a former sorority girl. They quickly bond over past relationships with abusive men and a shared passion for chemicals. Ben Grinberg plays Anders, a former flame and drug buddy of Christina's, just back from Thailand bearing the kind of wisdom gained from going to too many parties before age 25.

The play isn't particularly plot-heavy: It's all how the three characters bounce off each other, old relationships fraying, new ones developing with a rapidity borne of desperation. About midway, the three take ecstasy and the lights dim, resulting in the awkward, dazed, intimate scenes that seem to naturally occur after 1 a.m.

Rosenberg founded Kensington's Hella Fresh Theater in 2011. Its stage, the Papermill Proving Ground, 2825 Ormes St., is just north of Lehigh Avenue and west of the Somerset stop on the Market-Frankford Line. "If you want a ride, we will come pick you up," their website promises.