By Sean Harris Oliver. Directed by Shawn Macdonald. Presented by Hardline Productions. At Pacific Theatre on Friday, February 19. Continues until March 5

Hardline Productions’ Bright Blue Future has a lot going for it, including some stellar acting. But it’s hard to invest in the play’s generic characters.

In playwright Sean Harris Oliver’s script, four young adults party their brains out in Victoria. Alex is wearing an ankle bracelet because she got caught with a bunch of drugs. Her live-in girlfriend, Arianna, has quit school, but she hasn’t told her parents because she wants to keep spending the money that they’re doling out for her education. Arianna’s pal, Carston, needs to hide out with them because he stole a big bag of coke from a dealer in Vancouver. These three are in a nightclub when Carston picks up young Josh, who really likes getting high, but who has never had sex with a man before.

Off the top of the show, when the characters are clubbing and when they first come home to Arianna and Alex’s apartment, the dance music is so relentless, and the characters are so loud and wired, that they form an impenetrable wall of dysfunction. And they keep it up for a long time. By intermission, the only character I was invested in was Josh, and that’s because Carston was so obviously preying on him.

Act 2 gets more interesting, but, throughout, Oliver’s characterizations stay in the shallows because of his well-intentioned but superficial analysis. Josh goes on a rant about his generation’s lack of economic opportunities. Arianna complains bitterly about being brought up with unrealistic expectations of success. Okay. Gen Y has its challenges. But there’s got to be a lot more behind dangerous drug use than generalized ideas about social disappointment, and Oliver tells us very little about the specifics of these characters’ lives. Even when he gets into interpersonal dynamics, the exploration is vague: Arianna hasn’t come out to her parents, which upsets Alex. Coming-out stories are important, but if you’re going to make them matter, you’ve got to do more than rough in the by now very familiar outline.

Fortunately, under Shawn Macdonald’s direction, the acting in this production is excellent. Curtis Tweedie, whom I’ve never seen before, is splendid as Josh. His characterization is subtle and responsive, even as he’s playing both innocence and intoxication—neither of which is easy. Genevieve Fleming delivers an impressively layered performance as Arianna: mothering, selfish, principled, and ashamed. Rachel Cairns is solid—as always—as Alex. And Dmitry Chepovetsky is deeply creepy as the weak Carston.

The show has an impressively consistent look about it, too, that starts with the disco lights in the lobby, and the glow-stick bracelets everybody in the audience gets to wear. Lighting designer Jill White does a spectacular job of tracking the characters’ extreme ups and downs: just wait for the cocaine special.

There’s some lovely writing here—in the rhythms of a stop-and-start exchange in which Alex and Carston try to explain to Arianna why Josh is unconscious, for instance, and in the imagery, including Josh’s desire to live with the intensity of blue neon. I just wish that the playwright had allowed himself to explore these characters’ lives more deeply, as opposed to trying to make a point with them.