They’re blasting into town

Sarah KANE’s antiwar play “Blasted” set off a storm when it premiered in London in 1995, with early reviewers ridiculing it as “a disgusting feast of filth” and “devoid of intellectual and artistic merit.” Now the play is being brought to Los Angeles for the first time by the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, which usually operates out of a 40-seat storefront in Santa Ana.

In the last five years, Rude Guerrilla has emerged as one of the region’s least risk-averse when it comes to stark depictions of violence and sexuality. Artistic director Dave Barton says he decided that “Blasted” -- which features nudity, sex both consensual and otherwise, and a climactic binge of horrors -- would be a fitting vehicle for introducing the company’s aesthetic to L.A. with the production that opens Friday at the 98-seat GTC Burbank Theater.

It’s the play’s second production in the United States; the recent premiere at a small theater in Seattle prompted Seattle Times critic Misha Berson to write that it “may well be the best show in town you don’t want to see.”

The withering attack on the first London staging of “Blasted” prompted such British playwrights as Harold Pinter and Edward Bond to embrace Kane as a kindred creative spirit and leap to her defense. Pinter sent Kane -- who hanged herself in 1999 at 28, after writing four other plays -- a letter praising “Blasted,” her debut, for “facing something actual and true and ugly and painful.” Many consider the play the first salvo in a movement of hard-edged young British playwrights that also includes Mark Ravenhill (“Shopping and

Barton says he has long wanted to see how L.A. audiences would respond to Rude Guerrilla’s wares, but it isn’t as if he held on to “Blasted” as a calling card. When the company obtained the rights to the play in February, after previously having been turned down by Kane’s estate, he did not want to wait and risk a change of mind, so rather than rearrange his season in Santa Ana, he looked for a theater in the L.A. area that his troupe, which rarely has production budgets of more than $1,000, could afford to rent. He is friendly with the two bosses at Grove Theater Center in Garden Grove, and he says they gave him a good deal on their satellite stage in Burbank.

If “Blasted” is well-received and manages to recoup its $7,000 to $10,000 nut, by far the biggest budget in Rude Guerrilla’s seven-year history, Barton, a lifelong Orange County resident, says he would like to continue bringing shows to L.A. occasionally. But he has no desire to transplant his company.

“We’re going to continue to do this kind of work in Orange County,” he says -- including a possible remounting of “Blasted” in Santa Ana next year.

-- Mike Boehm