LOUISVILLE — For a lot of years, the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville has had certain staples on its Chinese menu of premieres.

        You can count on an out-of-the-box comedy or drama by a relatively unknown writer. The action will move along in a collage of related vignettes and include heightened reality, dreams and fantasies. You can count on there being an entry by Jane (ATL artistic director Jon Jory?) Martin.

        Whether all that will change under the new artistic directorship of Marc Masterson remains to be seen. The 25th edition of Humana opens with an out-of-the-box, light and engaging “romantic” comedy by Melanie Marnich.

        ""Move” is the operative word in heroine Sally's (an adorably gamine Tracey Maloney) vocabulary.

        She moves from place to place and man to man — the ice fisherman in Minnesota who offers to cook up pike, walleye, woodchuck; the married beauty contest judge in Memphis; the guy on an airplane bound for Denver because he wants to be a cowboy, and almost countless other very strange encounters.

        The point is Sally is looking for love, and sometimes not even in all the wrong places — except that the love always ends and leaves her in the wrong place.

        Sally mantras her big questions — Why don't you love me like you used to? Why doesn't the marriage vow say to take in sickness and health and never for granted? — and adds up four letter words like love, lust, want, more, move.

        And all the while she's fascinated by a tall, severely blond astrophysicist who has taken to wearing a black leather trench coat and mean-business black leather boots since starting a new career of serial killer.

        In several of her moments alone under a spotlight, the killer spouts gibberish that sounds like a cross between high science and metaphysical bunk.

        She has a fan club of women who admire her “power, velocity, courage without compromise” and has heart-to-hearts with Sally in Sally's dreams before they briefly meet face-to-face in a gas station convenience store.

        There's a lot to like in Quake. There isn't a woman breathing who won't recognize Ms. Marnich's quickly sketched, wickedly funny takes on Boyfriends From Hell. (Ms. Marnich has also done plenty of moving in her career, including some time in Cincinnati.)

        Quake is both poetic and pop — and pop is hard to pull off. Referencing can weigh down a play with lead, but her references are so clever they might be filled with helium. She has a certain “Gen-X sais quoi,” to quote one of her characters.

        And a playwright couldn't ask for more than ATL's production directed by Susan V. Booth. Moving walkways crisscross the bare stage moving people and props in and out as Sally speeds along on her cross-country adventure.

        Ms. Booth finds imaginative and laugh-out-loud ways to visually reference a lot of Ms. Marnich's funny ideas and dialogue.

        For all Sally's moving, she doesn't move us. That would have been a cherry on top for what's already a bright and affable 90 minutes of theater.

        As for Sally and her man troubles, she never does learn the life lessons she needs to. But there is that ever-changing map of the United States below her feet and a bright cluster of stars above her head, suggesting everything's going to be OK.

        Quake, continuing in repertory through April 1, Humana Festival of New Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville. (502) 584-1205 or www.actorstheatre.org.

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