Fringe: Death, space, soil and a quintet

It's actually the inaugural play by Hella Fresh Theatre, a new stage company in the performance space of the just-opened Papermill, an old paper mill on little Ormes Street in the Kensington neighborhood. There, a group of artists have created a gallery and are working on classrooms and a lounge, and rent studios for as low as $100 a month.

The best of HOF's five one-acts, - all written and directed by Hella Fresh's founder, John Rosenberg, who appears in two of them - is the last, "Gold Diggers of 2002." It's the story of a young man (handsome Scott Sitman, a natural actor) and the young woman he meets (the alluring, convincing Hannah Gavagan) on Christmas Day 2001 at the Algonquin Bar in New York. They seem strangers in the oncoming night, and Rosenberg's plot offers backstories that give the play more heft as it moves along, well-performed by its two believable actors.

The first one-act, "Untitled," has Rosenberg as a rough-and-tumble GI in Paris during World War II, visiting what he believes is the studio of Pablo Picasso (Jerry Carrier, a retired Philadelphia Daily News staff writer who has taken to acting over the past decade). Of course, it's not Picasso, and things seem to fall apart from the tense first moments; the soldier, though, is a fuzzily-defined character, and he seems to unwind without real cause.

A play set in Saigon was nearly incomprehensible to me. Another, in Hollywood, has good possibilities and could be enlarged to a fuller piece. And one set in Iraq features a female soldier whose instant nastiness is without reason and whose eventual mellowing is as mystifying.

   - Howard Shapiro

$10. 1:30 and 4 p.m. Saturday and Sept. 18; 4 p.m. Sunday. Papermill Theatre, 2825 Ormes St.