Great acting, sets, but 'Finn' still thin

8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 5 p.m Sunday and Sept. 28. 2 p.m. Sept. 21. Through Oct. 4. $23-$27. Actor's Express, 887 W. Marietta St. N.W., Suite J-107, Atlanta. 404-607-7469, actorsexpress.com

Bottom line: A boring sex thriller, oddly enough.

In Katherine Anne Porter's beautifully hallucinogenic story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," a young woman in a near-death state perceives that the world around her is changing: The room is different, the bed is different, it's as if the "whole house was snoring in its sleep."

In playwright Jordan Harrison's erotically charged ghost story "Finn in the Underworld," it's as if the house itself is having a bad dream. Opening Actor's Express' 21st season, "Finn" is a tingly thriller about a pair of sisters gone home to pack up their parents' belongings —- and sort through the damage done by a horrific incident that occurred long ago in the family's subterranean nuclear-bomb shelter.

Like a distant cousin of Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend," both about the mysterious deaths of young children, "Finn" meditates on time, memory, death and desire. Here, director Freddie Ashley offers up an elegantly designed production of ticking clocks and suspenseful, cinematic touches.

While Gwen (Mira Hirsch) and Rhoda (Marianne Fraulo) argue over Ansel Adams photographs and Eames lamps that their parents left behind, Gwen's sexually adventurous 20-year-old son Finn (Louis Gregory) gets involved in a dangerous erotic assignation with neighborhood perv Carver (Doyle Reynolds).

As a projector gives us minute-by-minute updates on the time, the realism dissolves into a claustrophobic, don't-open-that-door thriller of lurid sex, surprise twists and a fascinating interlude that plays like a cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Never mind poor pill-popping Gwen, her old-maid sister, snarky son and the freaky guy who lives in the red house down the street. It's as if the play itself is having a nervous breakdown —- or being slowly choked to death.

Though Harrison's experimental structure is an intriguing investigation of the dreams and the subconscious, the creepy tale amounts to little more than an archetypal Big Bad Wolf story with some kinky diversions. Ultimately, watching the 85-minute one-act fall apart is more frustrating than tantalizing.

Fraulo and Hirsch give top-drawer performances. Designer Kat Conley (sets) and Joseph P. Monaghan III (sound and lighting) create clean crisp conceits that play up the clockwork motifs and jitters.

But "Finn" promises more than it delivers and comes off as more pretentious and pointless than genuinely affecting. Nothing wrong with making audiences leave the theater scratching their heads and wondering, "What the heck was that?" But aside from its naughty shock factor and poetic style, it's pretty thin in the underworld.