One of my favorite duties as Creative Loafing theater critic is checking out the small companies that arise year after year. I'm excited by the prospect of discovering new talent — particularly actors whom I may never have witnessed before and directors demonstrating imagination and taste.

Then there's the possibility that some no-name group of strangers will eventually turn into one of the Bay area's best companies — as Jobsite Theater did only a few years after its erratic debut in Ybor City. Some theater groups may disappear after only a few productions — Dog & Pony and The Actor's Company come to mind — and others will settle into months of silence followed by brief reawakenings: Fresh! Live! Theatre and Alley Cat Players.

But there's never a good reason to prejudge even the smallest company playing in the oddest venue. After all, the obscure Cruciverbalist Theatre Collective last year put on Neil LaBute's autobahn in a little-known Gulfport space, and the experience was impressive.

Which brings me to another reason these small companies are worth covering: They often produce plays no one else thinks to touch. It was the small, struggling companies that brought us Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, LaBute's harrowing Bash, Mac Wellman's Sincerity Forever and Mollie Bailey's Traveling Circus. I'm delighted that I saw them all. Each of these was important, more important than many of the shows offered by the larger playhouses. I'm delighted that I saw them all.

Well, the latest contender to appear on the scene is called Straydogs Theatre Company, and it's offering William Mastrosimone's drama Extremities, about a woman's revenge on an attempted rapist. Simply put, this is a not very good production (but early productions seldom are) of a not very good text.

There is one skillful actor — Luke Weaver as the criminal Raul — but the other three performers seem miscast, and the direction and set design leave much to be desired. Further, Mastrosimone's play would be a problem under any circumstances (readers may know it better from the film version with Farrah Fawcett): It offers one powerful scene in which the female protagonist is nearly raped, follows that with a reversal, in which the intended victim imprisons the perpetrator in a fireplace — and then goes approximately nowhere for the hour or so that remains.

Lacking plot for a good two-thirds of its length, the play calls out for actors who can convince us that, at least on the psychological level, their characters continue to develop. But the actresses who play near-victim Marjorie and her two roommates never take us on that journey: they emote, they bicker, they show anguish and confusion, but in no particular order, suggesting no particular evolution. And because Mastrosimone's script asks Raul, once he's captured, to do little but groan and plead for help, even Weaver's performance ultimately becomes tedious.

Straydogs may turn out to be a significant force in local theater, but as other young companies have had to learn, casting is destiny, and even the best casting can't salvage a mediocre text. At least if Mastrosimone had some love of language, some aptitude for memorable dialogue….

The evening opens strongly, with a near-rape that's so horrifyingly realistic it may be too powerful for some spectators to take. Alix Faulhaber plays Marjorie, the young woman who's doing a little housekeeping when Raul appears out of nowhere, asking for someone named Joe. When she orders him to leave her house, he refuses; when she pretends that her husband's sleeping upstairs, he calls her bluff; and when he wrestles her to the ground and nearly smothers her to death, it becomes clear to her — and us — that her only chance of remaining alive may be to submit to his sexual violence. In this scene, Weaver is terrifying — apparently high on some drug, utterly bereft of anything like conscience — and Faulhaber's terror is so convincing that we feel stunned and, like her, desperate.

But when Marjorie manages to overpower Raul, to blindfold him and chain him up in her fireplace, the play reaches its climax — about an hour too early. In her justifiable rage, Marjorie torments the would-be rapist with harmful liquids and sharp-edged solids. But when she pours gasoline on Raul and threatens to set him afire, the play suddenly loses energy.

Of course we know she won't do it — how is the actor supposed to fake immolation? — and when she unconvincingly can't manage to light the fatal match, we also guess that very little in the hour to come will really change anything. I don't want to give away the small bits of action that still remain, so I'll just say that Marjorie's two roommates eventually appear and try to help their friend decide what to do with creepy Raul.

By now, Faulhaber's performance offers little but fury, while the actors who play the roommates — Loryn Heffner as Terry and Colleen Marvell as Patricia — never show us the kinds of specificity and complexity that are part of any real personality. By the middle of Act Two, Raul has groaned and pleaded 10 times too often, Marjorie and her roommates have bickered and bullied each other pointlessly, and we just want something — anything — to happen. What started as a powerful, stunning experience has turned all too amateur, too artificial, too aimless.

The set, attributed to Mike Becker, Sunny and Alix Faulhalber and Billy Alleman, is no great help: There's a usefully large stand-alone fireplace of course, but there's also mismatched furniture and a round table that looks like it's been through a hurricane. The costumes are somewhat better — Raul's downscale vest is a nice touch, looking like it came from a special offer on a cigarette pack — and the lighting is tolerable if crude.

Three "co-directors" are named in my program: Missy Mullens, Alix Faulhaber and Billy Alleman. The moral here is probably about too many cooks and their broth, and maybe also about the inadvisability of having a director oversee herself.

In any case, what a really good director has is taste — taste that insists on excellence from every actor and designer. If Straydogs sticks around — and I hope that it will — it'll have to find some ruthlessly exacting directors, even if that means leaving some friends off the credits.

Based on my experience of other new theater groups over the years, I can confidently say that Straydogs Theatre Company has a future — or not, depending on a score of factors. Beyond that, the unknown. Hey, Hat Trick is about to produce its first show at Gorilla Theatre — a real step forward. And Acorn, which had all the will in the world, is, temporarily at least, out of operation. If there's logic in all this, it's utterly beyond me.

But at least I can suggest this: Next time, let's bet on a better play than Extremities. And on a cast that serves the play, that illuminates it and deepens it.

Then the sky's the limit.

This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.