FINER NOBLE GASES is a darkly funny and vividly-imagined absurdist nightmare for our time, the inert occupants of an East Village apartment -members of a band called "Less"- are going numb. Pill-popping Chase and Staples banter about childhood, snowmen, and caribou as they sit mesmerized in front of the television...until its untimely demise. Desperately in need of technological stimulus, they decide to call up their weird neighbor, luring him upstairs and under Chase's narrative spell so that Staples can steal his Magnavox via the fire escape. The strange arrivals and events that follow move from the hilarious to the disturbingly existential, as Rapp's electronic-age creatures long to feel something, to be part of something, or to be of use. Playwright Adam Rapp uses the chemical term “finer noble gases” (gases that do not readily attach to other elements to form a compound) to describe the mental, and indeed chemical state, of these characters lost in a downward spiral of apathy, drugs, and convenience.