Theater: Hand Grenade

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EXTREMITIES By William Mastrosimone

This is a sting ray of a play. It lashes the audience with melodramatic fury. Its subject is rape, and rape is a four-letter word that screams.

Among crimes against the person, rape is a close second to murder, for it violates the body and desecrates the spirit at the same time. Despite its manifest ugliness, it makes a powerful subject for a play, since any bruising or brutal confrontation between two or more human beings is the atavistic fuel of drama. Indeed, plays with rape as a central motif recur in theatrical literature. Perhaps the most notable is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in which the heroine-victim, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off. She secures her revenge when she reveals her rapists' identities by scratching their names in sand.

Rape, like drama, is an eruptive act; it may detonate in slumberous surroundings. In Extremities, the curtain rises on a drowsy afternoon in a farmhouse somewhere between Trenton and Princeton, N.J. Marjorie (Susan Sarandon) is lolly-gagging about the living room in a bathrobe. Her two roommates are away at work and she is watering plants and feuding with insects.

Suddenly, a nongentlemanly caller opens the screen door and asks, as a ruse, for a guy named Joe who supposedly lives there. Raul (James Russo) is one of nature's punks. He exudes malignant animal magnetism. As the world is his jungle, women are his chosen prey. Marjorie tries a feeble ploy about a policeman husband asleep upstairs, but Raul knows better. He rips the phone cord out of the wall and pins Marjorie to the floor as he semi-suffocates her with a pillow.

In a scene of electrifying revulsion, Raul coaches Marjorie on how to beg for his sexual assault: "Touch my hair. My mouth. My neck . . . Now touch me down there and say you wanna make love!" In a desperate last-minute lunge, Marjorie grabs hold of a roach-killer can and sprays the chemical directly into Raul's eyes.

In the next act, the emotional balance shifts completely. Marjorie may be viewed either as an avenging angel or a paranoid witch. She has trussed up Raul in the fireplace and pinned a white blindfold around his head. She has clamped the head of a brass bedstead in front so that the fireplace resembles a prisoner's cell or an animal's cage. She pokes Raul in the stomach and groin with a broomstick, pours ammonia on him pretending it is gasoline, and peppers him with matches, threatening to burn him to death.

Marjorie's two roommates come home to this bizarre scene. Terry (Ellen Barkin), having once been raped, has no stomach for reliving it. Patricia (Deborah Hedwall) is a card-carrying pop psychologist who wants to relock the Pandora's box of irrationality. She is given to such phrases as "Define your terms" and "I can relate to that."

Marjorie, convinced that the law, as it often has done to women in her situation, will smear her as a seductress and absolve her assailant, wants to bury Raul alive in the garden. That does not happen.