Fatal Peril
UMO Ensemble at Broadway Performance Hall
Through Oct 12.

Fatal Peril creates a poetry of brutality, at once vicious, unblinking, and beautiful. A harrowing hour and a half, its humor is deadly and never backs away from its subject, which is violence of all kinds--familial, social, symbolic, internal, institutional, sexual. A cycle of surreal sketches loosely threaded around a marriage careening toward murder, Fatal Peril tightropes impressively between mockery and mawkishness without succumbing to either. The UMO clowns perform a parade of grotesqueries, large and small, with murderously jealous lovers, a mother who flies into crockery-smashing rages, and street-corner dudes in Fuck You! duels. Two opposing refrains sound throughout: the cold gore of newspaper reportage and the all-too-articulate inner bellowing of combatants.

Etta Lilienthal's set design, evocative of a Middle Eastern medina, was beauty in itself, as was Bill Moyer's original score, which borrowed liberally from hiphop, circus music, mechanized roars, and White House sound bites. Rarely do actors, set, sound, and lighting depend so heavily and so successfully on one another, weaving a stunning whole. This guided tour through the valley of the shadow of death is ensemble work at its best.

Those interested in violence--and, at this stage of the American experiment, everyone should be--will learn from this profound meditation on cruelty. My only suggestion: Lose the throat-clearing prologue. Explanations and introductions erode the power of the actual performance.

I am not one of those uncritical UMO fanatics. The company has put up duds in the past, but Fatal Peril isn't one of them. The show is expensive (nearly 20 bucks per seat) but it is one of the few theatrical events worth every penny. BRENDAN KILEY

Homebody/Kabul
Intiman Theater
Through Oct 11.

A middle-aged British woman sits in a chair and twines, snakelike, through a lengthy and ever-deepening fusion of abstract musing about language, rumination on her arid marriage and fraught relationship with her daughter, and the complex history of the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, as gleaned from a 1960s guidebook. It's a challenging way to open an almost four-hour-long play, but playwright Tony Kushner--author of Angels in America--never shies away from the challenging, the difficult, the ambitious.

The actual play that follows this compelling opening is much the same: broad in scope, maddeningly discursive, constantly trying to absorb and express another point of view--Shakespeare, in contrast, seems miserly. The unnamed British woman (Ellen McLaughlin)--the Homebody of the title--has mysteriously left home and disappeared in Kabul; her daughter (Kristin Flanders) and husband (Laurence Ballard) come to find out if she's alive or dead. Conflicting stories, the lure of heroin, and a guide who writes poems in Esperanto draw them deeper and deeper into the realm of the Taliban, until they may not be able to get out.

Homebody/Kabul's greatest weakness is that it's written not so much in scenes as in speeches; just about every character launches into a diatribe, a plea, or a rumination, around which ragged fragments of dialogue string the plot together. There's no faulting the intelligence or passion of this writing, but the play's momentum might be better served by a little pith. Bartlett Sher's lean and spare staging wisely emphasizes the actors and the text, with occasional dashes of visual spectacle, ranging from a disco ball to a luminous sheet of green plastic. The only weakness in a superb cast is Flanders, not due to a lack of talent but because she exudes a certain levelheadedness; the daughter's impulsive actions seem not so much understandably heedless as annoyingly foolish.

But these are quibbles. Kushner's plays explode on the theatrical landscape because no one else writing today combines political thought and human emotion with such skill and empathy. McLaughlin's performance alone, both subtle and stunning, is worth your time, and the rest of the play provides dozens of jolts and seductions to your heart and mind. See it. BRET FETZER

PileDriver!
Re-bar
Through Oct 11.

I once labored under the misconception that pro wrestling is a pastime reserved for booger-eating jackanapes--the sort of tornado bait known to screw cousins and speak of "tailgate parties." The idea of gay pro wrestlers seemed a mad incongruity on par with "truth in advertising," flamboyant tights and sweaty groping of man-flesh be damned. So the notion of sitting through a two-hour production that details the astonishingly melodramatic and colorful lives of an astonishingly gay, gay, GAY group of pro wrestlers (during the tacky, hairstyle-challenged decade of the '70s no less)? At best it seemed patience-taxing, at worst, as entertaining as an evening of amoebic dysentery set to country music.

How fucked in the head was I?

A small and sketchy band of (yes) gay pro wrestlers travel from city to city, slamming each other around (don't worry, it's all fake) and stealing each other's hearts--a rather complex story of forbidden love, denial, and betrayal. Sort of. It portrays the courage and sensitivity of a group of deviants making their way in a cruel and brutal world. Sort of. And it's strange enough to be based in truth (which it is, loosely: the story of Harvey Lloyd Jones, AKA "Killer Karl 'The Kraut' Kramer"), and I really can't make it sound any less corny than it is. But the fact remains that this loud, frantically energetic production is fun and smart, waxes surprisingly touching, and boasts not only a flawless cast (Tim Hyland, Peter O'Connor, Shelley Reynolds, and Josh List are individually remarkable, and John Kauffman gives a topper than top-drawer performance as "Rock 'The Cock' Hard" under the direction of Andy Jensen) but also the hottest damn simulated stage sodomy I've ever seen. And trust me, I've seen plenty.

PileDriver! has skewered my perception of pro wrestling forever. Let it skewer yours, too. ADRIAN RYAN