The Frump Tucker Theatre Company's new production of Trust, scored by Chicago pop artist Steve Kouba, ought to have particular appeal to those denizens of Wicker Park's rock scene famous (fairly or unfairly) for cruising nightly from rock bar to grunge club scoping for fresh sexual hook-ups and attractive musical talent.

Local scenesters will be drawn not only by the presence of Kouba, who opens the show standing and strumming an acoustic and never leaves the stage thereafter, but also by the subject of the story by American playwright Stephen Dietz: the pleasures and pain of the meet-and-greet-court-and-copulate rock-n-roll lifestyle.

The script, whose many barbed witticisms are somewhat sharper than its insights about rock, tells the story of Cody Brown, a singing-songwriting hot young thing (played in this well-acted production by a perfectly cast David Hoke) struggling to keep his introduction to magazine cover-level fame from threatening his engagement to a high school sweetheart.

Kouba's live performance (which on a few nights is replaced by a recording) helps to lend three-dimensions to a play that doesn't go out of its way to define the music of its lead characters. Not that this is a musical. Kouba's instrumentals don't really attempt to give us insight into the songwriting of Cody or the embittered, faintly Joni Mitchell-esque, ex-star with whom he has an affair. That's a bit disappointing, but frankly an attempt to embody the sound of these allegedly exceptional rock heroes could as easily be disastrous as successful.

Instead Kouba underscores the drama with relative understatement. The main leitmotif opens with way simple moveable guitar chords (the sort you learn on day one of guitar lessons), perhaps to match the mood of the play's comic depiction of the deceptively carefree side of the rock business. The theme then slides into bittersweet minor chords appropriate to the themes of lost innocence and trust born of casual sexual interplay.

Peppy Hammond organ jams set the stage for comic scenes in which characters trade witty rejoinders about the differences between long- and short-term love (wedding gifts, one character wisely notes, are wasted on the wedded because it's single people who could really do with a new set of non-stick cookware). Drum machines, synth strings and loud minor key acoustics emotionally amplify the more purple moments of heated drama. Once or twice, a U2-esque electric guitar effect will add some welcome originality. Basic acoustic guitar strumming creates believable (if repetitive) atmospheric backing for scenes in a rock club, as barflies plot their conquests.

While the melodies occasionally border on dull, Kouba is to be commended for avoiding the overambition of the synth orchestrations on his promising self-released album Consanguinuity. As NPR's This American Life proves, the simplest of chord repetitions can add resonance to any story. To his credit, Kouba's play score usually chooses its instruments for their own resonance and not for the resonance of the instruments they electronically attempt to imitate (thus avoiding a common failing in original scores in small theaters).

The simplicity of the music, somehow, seems better suited to a play about a sub-fame rock scene like Wicker Park's than a post-fame rocker with his face on the cover of Rolling Stone. But then that may simply accentuate an inherent problem with Dietz's script: while his pithy observations on the pressures and problems of the rock life are entertaining, they don't always show any real depth of knowledge about the biz. Cody Brown is supposedly at the apex of his stardom: who he eats with is said to be trivia, who he sleeps with headlines. So why does he waste his time with an interview on a local public radio station with a new age hour? The nerdy public radio DJ says his album is at the top of the charts. Which charts? Is this DJ breaking format to play top 40 records? Dietz's script is hardly dense with evidence of a Nick Hornby-like grasp of pop trivia. Perhaps the situations would ring more true if Brown were on the cusp rather than the wave of stardom.

After all, the play is smartest and most knowing on the subject of sex. My guess is, Wicker Parkers will relate to the play less for its observations on the high-stakes world of big record labels than its observations on single life in rock bar culture.

Kouba's score succeeds quite nicely in setting the latter mood.