At Fassbinder Play, Who’s ‘Sorry Now’?

Bristling with nudity and fetish gear, Frederique Michel’s production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now,” at City Garage, is prurience on parade, heavy on kink and light on content.

Fassbinder, who died of an overdose in 1982, specialized in skewing societal conventions and pushing the limits of propriety in his films and theater works, as this typically outre offering demonstrates. The story revolves around the true account of child-murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, neo-Nazi ideologues whose infamous Moors Murders made headlines in the 1960s.

From this factual framework, Fassbinder spins off into a nonlinear pastiche of human abasement. We see extraneous scenes of spanking schoolmasters, violent rapes, inhumane medical experiments--snippets of cruelty that are later repeated verbatim--only this time with the victims playing the tormentors. Despite the play’s short running time, this repetition makes for a long and dreary haul, however symbolically intended.

Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s multimedia production design is handsomely executed--although we could do without the stomach-wrenching slides of the actual child victims flashing on the upstage wall. In last season’s “Georges Sand,” Michel proved that an ingenious director can sometimes make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, yet regardless of her best efforts in this outing, “Paradise” remains obdurately swinish. As for the acting, the intrepid performers dare to show all--except talent. An exception to the general amateurishness is Jonathan Liebhold’s Brady, a buttoned-down monster whose deceptive reserve masks unholy appetites.

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* “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 17. $20. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.