Oscar Madison and Felix Unger have got nothing on the focal couple of Rapist James, a volatile if improbable new play being given its world premiere by Next Stages in the studio space above the Huntington Theatre Company mainstage. Katie is an unstable if funkily cute-as-a-button photographer; Sam is a preppy chip off H. or R. Block, a computer programmer whose baseball dreams can’t compete with a six-figure salary and a company car. Despite the fact that they mostly wrestle on the bed and bat at each other like a couple of pugilists, the two are planning to marry in a week. The wrinkle is that Katie has ostensibly been raped by her former boyfriend, brutally enough to have landed her in the hospital, but refuses to press charges. Sam, for his part, vacillates between solicitousness and suspicion. At least the alleged rape and the wedding give them something to talk about; otherwise, it seems unlikely these two could order from the same menu.

The author of Rapist James, which isn’t very good, is a nonetheless interesting new figure on the theatrical scene. Christopher Denham, 23, is all over the place, being championed by playwright Jon Robin Baitz and having a play commissioned by the Huntington at the same time that he makes his Broadway debut, opposite Danny Glover, in the current Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold ... and the Boys. He was recently included by Variety in a story titled " Top Ten to Watch: Bound for Glory in 2003. "

Denham wrote Rapist James, which is set in Chicago, while a senior at the University of Illinois. Recipient of the 2002 Ovid Fund Grant for New Writing, he is the author of five other plays (plus a screenplay) and has had his work aired at New York Stage and Film Institute, Second Stage, and Playwrights’ Horizons. Next Stages, which describes itself as " committed to identifying and producing work by and with emerging artists, " is on the lookout for new blood and, in the case of Denham’s, has had to stand in line.

Rapist James, however, is hard to buy, smacks of twentysomething solipsism, and seems to chase its tail toward an inevitable conclusion. In a series of short scenes separated by blackouts, Katie and Sam, who have been together for three years, try to move past their differences (in both senses of the word) and not let the recent rape derail their scheduled nuptials. Also on hand from time to time, radiating mixed motivations like some human Chernobyl, is Katie’s microbiologist PhD sister Ellen, who is also an insistent — if coke-snorting — Christian. In some ways, the passive-aggressive Ellen, who may be downright malevolent rather than merely duplicitous, is more interesting than either four-square Sam or self-indulgent Katie.

Denham’s point seems to be that Katie and Sam are looking to each other to fill the gaps in themselves — a little kookiness for him, a little financial and emotional stability for her — and are no more ready to marry, before doing more work on themselves, than the Rugrats. Katie, for her part, puts forward a sort of fragmented theory about privacy in coupledom: back rooms in the relationship where each can store his or her personal " shit. " But have the pair really been together three years without Sam’s having heard a word about his live-in girlfriend’s previous, unhealthily obsessive five-year liaison with a hottie artist who not only graduated from Yale but models underwear in ads on the sides of buses? And if you do the math, doesn’t that knock the 22-year-old Katie’s love life back into, like, elementary school? Well, it worked for Heathcliff and Cathy, whom Katie’s " James IS me " speech calls to mind.

Denham has a talent for clever, natural dialogue, though, and he spins a couple of imaginative scenarios — notably Sam’s account of a visit to a prostitute where, instead of getting down to the usual business, he played an elaborate game involving an almanac and pubic hair. And in Daniel Goldstein’s decently acted production for Next Stages, Amy French, a tad too petulantly gamine but still a believable Katie, and Nathaniel McIntyre, an understandably bewildered Sam, bring a sincere, slightly naughty babes-in-the-woods feel to their unlikely couple. Julie Jirousek does a nice job of beaming counselor Ellen’s inner predator. And set designer Cristina Todesco’s panels at the four corners of the cluttered in-the-round playing space, collages of mechanistic urban photographs including a number of fire escapes, suggest both Katie’s struggling muse and the obvious truth that these folks need an exit.