By Robert Avila

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER'S brief but prolific career as the most prominent figure of the so-called New German Cinema overshadows his contribution to the theater. In fact, as the leader of the young, radical, and tight-knit "anti-theater" group of Munich, Fassbinder wrote several plays that afterward became the basis for his own films. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1971) was one of these. And as Last Planet Theatre's cool and sultry production suggests, it remains a vital work for the stage.

The title character (compellingly played by Kathryn Wood) is a strong, sophisticated, and successful fashion designer who falls desperately in love with Karin (Tori O'Neill), a much younger and married working-class woman whom Petra takes in as her model and protégée. Their affair soon dissolves, leaving Petra devastated. Meanwhile, Petra's much abused assistant and servant, Marlene (Heidi Wolff), a crucial collaborator in her work, observes the entire episode in submissive but troubled silence.

The simple story line offers a subtle, unsparing portrait of power and desire among an exclusively female circle, one that also includes Petra's competitive friend Sidonie (Persephone Crittenden), Petra's mother (Cheryl Smith), and her teenage daughter (also played by O'Neill). While we hear along the way about men as oppressive bullies or worse, Fassbinder's women cannot be reduced to merely victims of an admittedly male-dominated world. Instead, they're victims and victimizers simultaneously, exercising a will to dominate that twists love into a need to possess.

But power never flows in only one direction. Karin may be Petra's class inferior, less experienced, less educated, and without money – yet it's she who owns Petra, more than the other way around. Petra's dilemma suggests we become the slave of what we possess. The irony grows richer when Petra pontificates about the need for discipline and effort to succeed in life, while Karin would just as soon lie in bed all day and can't see why people have to compete at all. (Karin's family was already decimated by the inequities of the class system. Having fled Germany for Australia, she returned only after finding that there too "you don't get anywhere without pushing.")

The barely disguised savagery below the surface of civility gains thematic color from Petra's métier. Fashion is, after all, the aesthetics of surface appearances. And in James Flair and Paul Rasmussen's set design (which includes a large circular bed at center stage, murals depicting female nudes in rustic and classical scenes, and a snowy winter landscape outside), Petra's posh lair serves as a metaphorical extension of her glamorous but fundamentally cold and barren existence.

Artistic director John Wilkins's staging heightens the already stylized and symbolical nature of the play with precise effects that convey an impulsive charm and droll excess. Moreover, his sharp and appealing cast handles it all with aplomb. Sidonie, for example, betrays the violent game going on between her and Petra under the pretense of polite conversation with involuntary peals of increasingly hysterical laughter. Petra, for her part, marks the escalation in their battle by roughly tweezing her friend's eyebrows or slyly handcuffing her wrist to the bed (the latter causes Sidonie to howl, "Petra! Don't make fun!"). In other scenes, Marlene, the ever present voyeur and invisible servant, wanders around snapping flash photos of those in the room without anyone taking the slightest notice of her. Such touches even tease new meanings from the material, especially when it comes to Marlene – played with a wonderfully disturbed stoicism by Wolff that can move from the erotic to the comic as the need arises. By the end we are wondering if the entire play wasn't really her own private fashion show after all.

Maid in the shade

Fassbinder had no monopoly on sex, class, power, and domestics, by the way. Many of the themes explored in Petra Von Kant reverberate once more in Hilda, the intense and extremely interesting debut play by Senegalese-French novelist Marie Ndiaye, which makes its U.S. premiere (in a translation by Erika Rundle) as part of American Conservatory Theater's First Look series. The polished production, helmed by ACT artistic director Carey Perloff, features a terrific performance by Ellen Karras as Mrs. Lemarchand, a tightly wound upper-middle-class housewife determined to have Hilda for her maid and apparently unable to stop talking.

Talking is, of course, the privilege of the powerful. But where Fassbinder's Marlene was denied speech in the role of servant, Ndiaye's Hilda has been altogether banished from the stage. The absence of the title character highlights one of the more ugly displays of naked class power: people who speak about their servants as if they were not in the room. Though Hilda's single 90-minute act builds relentlessly, the unidirectional mode of Mrs. Lemarchand's ever increasing and absurd demands can get monotonous, at least until the end and its haunting twist. 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant' runs through March 6. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m., Last Planet Theatre, 351 Turk, S.F. $15-$18. (415) 440-3505, www.lastplanettheatre.com.

'Hilda' runs through Feb. 26. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m. (also Feb. 26, 2 p.m.); Sun/20, 2 and 7 p.m., Zeum Theater, 221 Fourth St., S.F. $12-$24. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.