Showcased in just the right setting - the Bongo Club, one of Edinburgh's music venues - New Yorker Adam Rapp's play is about the washed-up, spaced-out members of a post-punk indie band. It opens with its protagonists semi-comatose from taking too many drugs, and continues in a similar vein until the play ends with a rock-gig finale.
It is true that quite a lot of the evening consists of people mumbling inanely to themselves about nothing much in particular, but Rapp's bleak script is an unflinching look at a slacker generation. It is perhaps appropriate that the name of the band in question is Less. The final gig sequence - in which the band, who indeed are a real band called Less, suddenly leap to their feet and play with energetic tenderness - is all the more moving because it allows us to see what they once were, rather than what they have become: an inert bundle of gases.
Sitting transfixed by the flickering TV, bowls of pills laid out in front of them like candy, and hugging themselves like small damaged children, the band represent an infantile society, in regression to the point of pissing on themselves. When the outside world does intrude, it is no more encouraging: their downstairs neighbour, Gray, is a lonely, homophobic, paranoid, medically obsessed conspiracy theorist.
If this is all sounds unremittingly bleak, be assured that it is. But amid the inertia there are tiny moments of hope: one of the group keeps putting his foot through the TV, as if hoping to make his fellow band members open their eyes to reality. And, in a tender but futile gesture, a dead child is brought into the seedy flat in an attempt to warm him. But like the child, the band is dead, and America's frozen heart is getting colder.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-557 2827.
