'Blasted' is an unsettling fable about war's horrors

A Theater Under the Influence's production of "Blasted" may well be the best show in town you won't want to see.

Here's why, in a nutshell: This searching, explosive fable by the late British playwright Sarah Kane doesn't just contain nudity, racism and homophobia. The violent rape, barbaric torture and cannibalism on view may also unsettle you.

Still with me? If you can lay aside all of the above for a moment and strip away the overzealous shock tactics of an edgy young writer trying to blow the protective gear off a jaded modern audience, "Blasted" proves fascinating in several respects. And A Theater Under the Influence's fearless, superbly performed American premiere of the controversial script deserves an audience.

Obviously influenced by the apocalyptic visions (and trenchantly poetic language) of such fellow stage provocateurs as Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Kane's "Blasted" begins with a fraught, mordantly funny tryst in a Leeds hotel — and closes, pretty much, with the end of civilization as we know it.

Keenly played by Eric Ray Anderson and Sharia Pierce, under Matt Fontaine's strong direction, the paunchy, middle-aged Ian and younger, gawky Cate have taken a room for the night.

In ways that keep you guessing, they are revealed to be quite the odd couple, entangled in a relationship that keeps sending out strange new tentacles. Abusive, sexually desperate and apparently paranoid, Anderson's gun-toting, gin-swilling Ian may truly love Cate. Or he might just be reaching out from a black void for the nearest warm object.

Cate is a changeable child-woman in Pierce's riveting performance. With her big watchful eyes and awkward postures, she appears to be both "thick" and shrewd, a vulnerable gamin and a tough survivor who is alternately responsive to andrepulsed by Ian's pitiful advances.

"Blasted" teases and challenges with more subtlety in the first long chunk of its two-hour bulk, when Cate and Ian are thrashing through the rocky power dynamics of their bizarre date.

Yet Pinteresque dread and foreboding are always in the air. And when the bombed-out hotel room (good design by Jenny Anderson) is invaded by a soldier (Mike Pham), the tale flips into an apocalyptic war parable.

"You're a nightmare," Cate says of Ian. But Pham's barking, grungy soldier is Ian's terror dream, in which all his bigotries, sexual rapaciousness and lovelessness come home to roost.

Kane wrote "Blasted" a decade ago (it was her first play) when the virulent war crimes in the Balkans conflagration were in the news. The connections this play makes between "casual" male-female violence and the uncivilizing horrors of war are viewed as universal, however. And for centuries daring playwrights have graphically traced a link between domestic and battlefield brutality — back to the Elizabethans, in such jolting dramatic incidents as the blinding of Gloucester in "King Lear" (a bloody deed "Blasted" appropriates).

But what gives "Blasted" its power is not the bleak, rather facile conclusions Kane jumps to, or the atrocities she piles on near the end. The latter can be gratuitous, even laughable, in a sick sort of way.

The fact is, "Blasted" didn't need them and gets undercut by the bloody excess. There is much more in the script, and this brave production, to ponder. And with its linguistic flair and gutsiness, "Blasted" offers evidence of a remarkable playwright in the making. How sad that Kane (who died in 1999 at age 28) did not live long enough develop her dark,blazing gifts to the fullest.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com