THEATER REVIEW : ‘Aspects’: The Crimes Behind Hyping Crime : Bou Tillisch’s play looks at the manipulation and motives involved in trying to profit from well-publicized murders.

Is it immoral to profit by writing a book or making a movie about a horrible crime? And what exactly motivates the lawyers who defend people accused of committing well-publicized murders? If they defame dead people in order to defend their clients, does that necessarily make them Satan’s agents on Earth?

According to a new play on these strangely familiar questions, the answers are a bit more clear-cut than most of us would have guessed. In Bou Tillisch’s “Aspects of the Obscene” at the Odyssey Theatre, a high school student named Rebecca Day is raped and beaten by her jilted teen-age lover and his jeering friends. They leave her for dead, and she dies.

The “media” swoop in for the Day family remains. An ambitious, sexy TV producer named Antonia (Marie Chambers) tries to con the bereaved mother into selling the rights to Rebecca’s story. Mom (Caryn West) finds the offer obscene.

For some reason, Antonia must make a TV film about this particular crime; no other will do. Left without an alternative, she decides to tell the story from the boys’ side, showing that the murderers are the true victims in the story. And, according to the logic of the play, this is a perfectly attainable--if immoral--goal.

But first, Antonia must find a defense attorney whose dearest wish is to become a producer himself. Antonia promises the slick lawyer, Hubbard (“call me Hub”), a partnership in her TV movie if he successfully defends the boys. He must make the jury see the mini-skirted Rebecca as culpable and the boys as victims of a teen-age prank that got out of hand.

Rather like Joseph McCarthy or Jesse Helms, this play believes in the Machiavellian power of the entertainment industry to exert a kind of mind control on the sheep-like masses. Yet “Aspects of the Obscene” is compulsively watchable, rather like the TV movies it regards as the country’s chief corrupter of justice, privacy and just plain decent human behavior.

Tillisch provides characters who have a lot at stake and who manage to be interesting if not necessarily surprising. As Antonia, Chambers flows seamlessly from flirting to wheedling, until she gets caught in her own trap. As the lawyer, John Boyle plays a vivid cartoon villain who exalts in his own slimy charisma. Jack Laufer is appealingly bemused as Antonia’s husband, Simon, an artistically bankrupted novelist.

In a sense, director Jan Lewis has embraced the crime movie’s raison d’etre --an arguably titillating flashback to the crime--which she projects in bits and pieces in a sound-and-slide show on screens throughout the evening and which leaves no room for doubt that the boys were truly guilty. On those screens, she also flashes newspaper and magazine articles on crime stories and issues. The flashing of these headlines seems to further suggest that it is somehow obscene to pay any attention at all to terrible acts of violence.

“Aspects” never considers that the public’s love of real-life crime stories could be something more than lurid, that it could also be a legitimate act of communal catharsis, as well as a memorial to a victim. As an argument, the play never really draws blood. But as an entertainment, ironically, “Aspects” works. It might even make a good movie of the week.

* “Aspects of the Obscene,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Feb. 5 and Feb. 19, 2 p.m. only. Ends Feb. 26. $17.50-$21.50. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours.