In the program forward for Adam Weiner’s first off-Broadway production, Rough Draft, he describes his piece as “something in the making,” hence the name. The spare set design buttresses his claim. Cinder blocks, wooden planks, piled rocks, scattered ladders and a tricycle. Based on the album by the same name, Rough Draft plays like a construction site, its guts hanging out and its frame exposed. Weiner is the mad architect, gritting his teeth, widening his eyes and growling his white-boy blues.

After drafting the sixteen songs that make up Adam’s second proper record, he found himself torn between two options: a cinematic accompaniment or a theatrical one with which to present the lyrical and musical themes therein. “I felt like there was a larger issue than just the music,” he explains of the dilemma. His indecision yielded the 75-minute multi-media presentation that held audiences captive at the new DR2 Theater from June 19th to the 29th. Combining a live rock performance with live action and running video footage, the piece deftly fuses together all of its elements to forge an effective and memorable viewing experience.

Essentially, this was a rock concert by sheer virtue of the music’s strength. Adam, performing vocal duties as well as all piano and guitar parts, moves with ease from one style to the next in both composition and performance. His backing band does him no small service, with the fleet-fingered and attentive Dave Pinzur on bass and Raki Sastri summoning primal, affecting rhythms from his junkyard drum-kit.

Opening with the driving “Blue For Baby #2,” Weiner immediately establishes himself, not as a mere imitator, but as a skilled interpreter of traditional American music. Taking a folk form and making it his own, he presses the haunted anguish of the delta blues through a canvas of his own personal experiences. Like much of what was to follow, “Blues” illustrated the underlying assumption of Weiner’s music, that suburban New Jersey and the pulsing metropolis of New York, as mechanical and post-modern as they may be, still birth their own folk cultures.

Even under this umbrella, the band, unofficially billed as Weiner and the Red Lights, moves across a broad range of ideas without hesitation, forcing theoretical contradictions into dangerously close quarters. The anxiety is palpable throughout.

On “Oh My God”, Weiner plays the irredeemable, an escaped convict unsheathing himself and mounting a nun, with little interest in salvation. The music, ragged and black, is a crime of aggression, with Adam squalling unrepentantly to his captors, “you cannot keep me in a hole / you cannot teach me self-control.” The edgy track is separated by minutes from the pure gospel of “No Mistakes.” Weiner doesn’t hide behind the general conceit of rock and roll irony to do it either. He courageously lunges headfirst, delivering a sonorous a cappella prayer that begs poignantly for direction and understanding from some unseen force. Joined by the band midway through, Adam turns it up a notch and, with little notice, the spiritual becomes a foot-stomping hillbilly revival. Pain turns to euphoria in a heartbeat.

One of Weiner’s greatest virtues is his uncluttered balance of light and dark. Under the pretense that life is twisted by paradox, Rough Draft’s bounciest moments are often its most menacing, as on the mock show tune “Campfire Smoke,” perhaps the first lounge song ever written about the Holocaust. Adam’s punchy, reckless piano tinkering is tuneful and pleasant, even as the lyrics are soaked in anger. Likewise, “The Labor Song” voices the disappointment of the American dream with such swinging enthusiasm that it’s hard not to enjoy it. Adam sings, “I’m pullin’ for the devil / I’m pushin’ for the man. / The world is on my shoulders / I’m doin’ what I can” and the jubilation in his voice is chilling.

None of this is to imply that the music doesn’t appropriately echo the ugliness that it takes on as its subject matter. The most adrenalized moment of the performance comes on “epoi,” a fuzzy rocker that shifts Neil Young into a raw, high-octane frenzy. With Weiner on electric guitar, and Raki and Pinzur turning in particularly exciting support work, the song is laced with razor wire. Contentedly apocalyptic, “epoi” whips in the wind like a gray cloud of smog over the NJ Turnpike. The vocals gush high and nervy, Weiner showing off the dirtiest part of his considerable range.

He exercises this range to great effect from one song to the next. At times, such as on the lovely a cappella poem “Come On Come” and the aching ballad “The Story,” his voice is clear, unadorned and mellifluous. At others, like the psychosexual punk of “I’m In Hell” and the thunderously evocative “Aids In Africa”, he is hoarse and raging, even throwing in the occasional Roky Erikson yelp at the highest end of the register.

As for the acting, a cast of four (Adam Carpenter, Zachary Steel, Justin Blanchard and Erin Weaver) pantomimed through the set while a projector filtered grainy, fractured images through a screen behind them. The actors were engagingly emotive and the images, culled mostly from scenic New Jersey, recalled the harsh grime of MTV’s grunge years. Carpenter and Weaver, in particular, were a pleasure to watch; the former providing the show with its funniest and lightest moments in his exaggerated gawkiness and the latter offsetting the predominantly masculine tendencies of the show with steamy sexuality and sweet vulnerability.

Given its structure, if Rough Draft was simply about versatility, it could be considered a success on that merit alone. But Weiner’s loftier goals make this more than just an above-average concert experience. “In the music itself,” he explains, “you might hear a certain appeal for collaboration, community and improved relations between people.” This accounts for the considerable scope of a project that manages to incorporate live and recorded music, live and recorded action, dancing and visual art all in the space of an hour. And therein, the themes of spirituality and emptiness, nativism and alienation, acceptance and resentment all coincide without the safety of resolution, proving that the human being is perpetually an unfinished product.

If Rough Draft warrants one criticism, it’s that the format necessitated by the multimedia presentation prevents the audience from demanding an encore, and believe me, after just over an hour of Adam Weiner’s music, you’ll want to hear a great deal more of his catalogue. You’ll have that opportunity soon, as Weiner and the Red Lights will be performing a hodgepodge of Adam’s songs in a show called “Piano, Honk and Hokum” at the NYC International Fringe Festival at PS122, August 19th, 21st-24th. Adam has described his work as a “rough draft for seeing how far the music can take us.” While that destination remains unclear, the seedy alleyways and rural back-roads that lead there promise to be crooked, perilous and thrilling.

For copies of Rough Draft, call 718.267.8469 or visit www.weinernet.com for more information.