By Robert Avila

HOWARD BRENTON, one of Britain's impressive crop of baby-boomer leftist dramatists, has been writing gritty, imaginative, deeply funny, often intensely provocative plays since 1969, but his well-founded fame in the UK hasn't translated into many productions stateside. So it's already with appreciation that one can look to Last Planet Theatre's new production of Sore Throats. Even better, Brenton's remarkable 1979 chamber play receives just the kind of taut, in-your-face treatment one would hope for.

Sore Throats may not be as overtly political as the majority of Brenton's plays – the subtitle (An Intimate Play in Two Acts) confesses as much, though maybe a little coyly too – but its portrait of a disintegrated marriage, and the revenge taken on it by the "liberated" former housewife, delves deeply into the murk of authority and money built into the foundations of home and hearth.

Jack (Matt Leshinskie) and Judy (Heidi Wolff), a recently separated couple each about 40 years of age, confront each other in a room completely bare except for some open champagne bottles that Judy (the flat is hers) has let accumulate on the kitchen counter. (James Flair and Paul Rasmussen's excellent set design makes ideal use of LPT's large stage to convincingly craft a modest but attractive one-bedroom apartment.) Jack, an off-duty police officer, eagerly seeks a new life with his young mistress in the old "New World," where he dreams of becoming a Canadian Mountie. To this end, he's come to reclaim half the money from the sale of their house, which he'd initially relinquished all claim to in a guilt-ridden gesture of parting. Judy, however, is far from letting him have subway fare, let alone 50 percent of the house. She plans to use the money herself, and with a vengeance, fantasizing aloud about an operation she'd like to get that would graft ferocious animals onto her sex parts ("Poke me, see what you get. Something really hot and surgical. Tiger snake woman.")

Accordingly, Jack's self-serving offerings of "no hard feelings" soon dissolve into their opposite, as he unleashes on Judy a brutally methodical, deeply shocking round of blows until she is able, physically and emotionally, to do little more than sign away the money. Afterward, Jack resumes small talk. ("You have the final row," he tells the audience. "Cataclysm. But you've still got to brush your teeth. Under the blood on the wallpaper, sit down with a nice cup of cocoa, eh?") After Jack has left, Sally (Miranda Calderon) enters. Employed as an operator at the newspaper where Judy placed an ad, she's inquiring about the room for rent. "Is the smell the place or her?" she wonders aloud to the audience. As Judy latches onto her for help, Sally, a sharp and gutsy twentysomething, sizes up the situation with another aside: "You open a door, any door, and you find yourself in an abattoir."

This is "intimacy" with a powerfully unsettling link to the quotidian chaos roiling beneath the social order. (It's already projected in the opening tableau, in which Jack in his black police uniform looms over Judy, seated on the floor.) With Sally's arrival, a fantasy of liberation plays out that echoes, in dissonant and questioning ways, the themes of a newly feminist era. As act one ends, a gruesome confrontation between Sally (who, despite her better judgment, can't help herself) and Jack (who's returned to fetch his pocket knife – memento and emblem of boyhood) leaves Jack stalking off with blood on his neck, and minus the contract he'd wrung from Judy. An initially wary Sally announces she will take the room after all.

Act two, set in the same flat one year later, presents us with Judy's and Sally's newfound freedom (from marriage and work, respectively). Once nearly empty, the room now bears the furnishings and slovenly housekeeping appropriate to Judy's youth. They've had a wild romp in New York, and seduced a fare share of the neighborhood's adolescent boys. But where it's all heading, or what it all amounts to, comes in for questioning – most brilliantly in Sally's mocking monologue directed at an imaginary male body on the carpet (deftly executed by Calderon to an eclectic selection of musical passages emanating from Judy's kitchen radio). Freedom remains elusive somehow. Judy's sense of it leads her to take the cash they have remaining from the sale of the house (which she's kept in a garbage bag) and spill it onto the floor, where it covers the rest of the mess like a fine, green mold. As they contemplate the dead end ahead, Jack enters, sans uniform, carrying a baby in a basket. But the nature of this detour you're better off learning for yourself.

If the outline of the plot conveys a sense of the play's deep reverberations, its raw but effervescent language is equally crucial to its success: the beautiful filth his characters speak, the violence of their words, the garish and eviscerating truths they utter, uncontrollably, as if possessed – in short, the wonderfully squalid poetry they make of the shit they wallow in. There's also the play's finely calibrated use of action and gesture. The stylized flights and crescendos of language and movement have something of the balletic viciousness found in Kubrick's Clockwork Orange – a delicate choreography of power, libido, and decay beautifully realized here in John Wilkins's inspired, powerfully focused direction. Three riveting performances (each company actor is doing some of their best work) and the wonderful coherence of the mise-en-scène complete the picture, ensuring the heightened atmosphere in the play's mix of realism and poetic reverie.

'Sore Throats' runs through Aug. 21. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m., Last Planet Theatre, 351 Turk, SF. $10-$18. (415) 440-3505, www.lastplanettheatre.com.