I RECENTLY MOVED from the Bay Area – a temporary glitch, I'm hoping – and these days, while trying to adjust to life in Los Angeles, memories of the people and things I love and have left behind tear at me with an almost physical violence. My friends laugh at me, then they forget about me – don't deny it, I know it's true – and at times I feel utterly disoriented. I must be homesick.

Of course it's more than that. In Los Angeles, people don't dislike the Bay Area; most of the time they just act like the place doesn't exist. And like many Bay Area residents (I still consider myself to be one) who've worked in and around the arts, I wonder why the best of what gets done here seems to be overlooked, or worse, dismissed by other regions. To be sure, there's plenty to ignore, but that's the case anywhere a healthy arts scene exists. The deeper problem is that the freedom to roam that Bay Area artists enjoy threatens those forced to toe the line elsewhere. At the top of L.A.'s "get-a-clue" list should be Intersection for the Arts, the Valencia Street community arts space that has an array of programs in visual arts, music, literature, and theater. I'm most familiar with the latter, and should anyone wonder why I'm passionate about it, Philip Gotanda's drop-dead stunning Fist of Roses, which opens at the end of the month, tells the story.

The play, an examination of male violence – as in why someone would beat a loved one to death – roams far and wide and then comes back and rocks you like an earthquake. Five men, all using their real names onstage – Donald Lacy, Michael Cheng, Rajiv Shah, Tommy Shepherd, and Danny Wolohan – effortlessly slip from character to character, across gender, ethnic, racial, and class lines, always using language as crude and common as the world they live in. That world, whether or not we want to acknowledge it, is our world, and as if to block all exits, Gotanda employs familiar pop music to bind us and bring the point home.

The play spotlights the disturbing undercurrents of romantic tunes like Teddy Pendergrass's "Love TKO" and Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," and it never veers far from the overt violence in Carol King and Gerry Goffin's "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." I imagine that the version recorded by the Crystals in 1962 would have been included had Phil Spector – currently facing first-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Lana Clarkson – not produced it.

In any case, the cast delivers a neatly choreographed (by Erica Chong Shuch) version, emphasizing the lines "He hit me and it felt like a kiss (felt like a kiss) / He hit me and I knew he loved me." I remember the song – I have a copy of it, truth be told – and though the fact that it was roundly rejected by the listening public offers a bit of insulation, Gotanda breaks through that with a grim deconstruction of the Temptations' "My Girl," one of pop music's loveliest moments. The cast sings along with the unforgettable opening bars of the record, which then fall away as they begin to stomp their feet and chant, "MY girl, MY girl, MY girlfriend, MY girlfriend, MY wife, MY wife, MY old lady, MY old lady, MY bitch, MY bitch, MY ho, MY ho, MY ho ..." This gives way to a flurry of grunting and stomping, and the Motown classic lies shredded on the floor.

I left the rehearsal as unwound as I've ever been by a performance, and like it or not, it was the kind of soulful, emotional work that characterizes what Intersection's resident company, Campo Santo, has created in recent years. For Gotanda, who gradually rose to national prominence in the '80s and '90s on the strength of work like Song for a Nisei Fisherman, The Wash, and Sisters Matsumoto – all exploring the postwar legacy of the internment camps on Japanese America – Fist of Roses shows his former genius in high gear but taking utterly new shape. That shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with his plays, but I was almost speechless that he adapted, and flourished, working in the uniquely collaborative and wide-open style that's developed at Intersection. It represents a startling change of direction for a playwright who could once charitably have been described as enjoying the control he had over his various projects.

The play is personal in the broadest sense, and it makes ungodly emotional demands on the cast, who rise to the occasion as an ensemble. That said, at the rehearsal I saw, I was knocked out by Lacy and Cheng, who has become a first-rate actor in recent years – as impressive in this play as he was last spring in Central Works' production of Chekhov's The Duel.

This is what I'm missing – except of course I won't, because I'll be in the audience on opening night. But it's what you'll be missing if you aren't there with me. As for my new neighbors, well, I live in a huge loft complex that's full of artists. I've been talking the ears off everyone down here, but I'm not sure anyone is listening.

'Fist of Roses' runs Oct. 27-Nov. 22. Thurs.-Sun. and Nov. 22, 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org.

E-mail J.H. Tompkins and read his blog.