Late at night, when he is alone, Dave Barton destroys things.

It's not that Barton is by nature a violent individual. In person, he is thoughtful, soft-spoken, and unfailingly polite. And it's true that the destruction taking place is only that of cyber-monsters in the Clive Barker's Undying video game on his home computer. But this doesn't take away from the fact that Barton has been under a lot of pressure of late, and he's got to blow it off somewhere.

Dave Barton is Artistic Director of Santa Ana, CA's Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, a small storefront theater with a growing national reputation, and he has just directed the California premiere of British playwright Sarah Kane's harrowing tale of life during wartime, Blasted.

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Blasted was the prolific Kane's first produced play, and one that quickly gained her international notoriety, mostly for all the wrong reasons. Produced by London's Royal Court Theatre in January, 1995, Kane's unflinching look at the human capacity for primal violence repulsed critics and theatergoers alike, many of whom were unable -- or unwilling -- to look beyond the surface outrage of Kane's writing to the deeper themes of connection and redemption which flowed beneath.

When Howard Barker wrote in his seminal Arguments for a Theatre that "the most appropriate art for a culture on the edge of extinction is one that stimulates pain," he could well have been writing about the essence of Blasted. Labeled as one of the "New Nihilists" of the 1990s, a media-branded group that included fellow young British playwrights Anthony Neilson, Joe Penhall and Mark Ravenhill, Kane, who died in early 1999 at age 28, went on to produce a stunningly visionary and varied body of work in a very short span of time, with Phaedra's Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (produced, 2000).

Dave Barton first became familiar with Kane's work about the time he was directing the first of several Mark Ravenhill plays, Shopping and Fucking, in early 2001. After a somewhat shaky start at a variety of host venues, Rude Guerrilla had begun to hit its stride in late 1997 after converting an empty furniture store in a depressed area of downtown Santa Ana into the Empire Theater and opening Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. With productions of classics by Sartre, Gorky and John Ford mixed with edgy, political works from contemporary writers such as Tim Miller, Brad Fraser, Ping Chong, Ken Urban and Ravenhill, Rude Guerrilla quickly blew the lid off the insular, hermetically-sealed Orange County theater scene, and has never looked back.

Barton has gained the reputation for choosing plays out on the leading edge of world events and politics, plays that seem always to be topical and ahead of the curve. Although he estimates he reads 100 or more plays per year in search of material, Barton is quick to shrug off his perceived prescience to the unfortunate predictability of world events.

"I wish I could say I was brilliant that way," he says. "But the fact is the world is a pretty fucked-up place. So if I decide to program an antiwar play, a play about discrimination or terrorism a year ahead, the sad thing is that it'll probably still be happening once the production rolls around."

Barton and partners Michelle Fontenot and Dawn Hess are also grounded in a sound business sense, and know how to generate publicity. While other storefront theaters in town were still trying to figure out how much postage to put on promotional postcards, Barton was drawing upon his experience in political activism and organizing to build a solid base of relationships with the media.

And theater folk, as well. Barton's relationship with New Jersey playwright and theater scholar Ken Urban was instrumental in Rude Guerrilla's eventually landing the rights to the California premiere of Blasted. Urban, who is Artistic Director of New York's the committee theatre company, and whose insightful monograph on Kane's work, An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane is published in PAJ (No. 69), first heard of Rude Guerrilla from Kane's brother Simon, who is executor of his sister's estate and controls the rights to her plays.

The result of this introduction was a Barton-directed production of Urban's New Jersey Trilogy in 2003. Urban flew out to see Rude G's production and came away impressed.

"I thought their production was great," he remembers. "I still can't believe they pulled off a three-plus hour production of three different plays with a cast of like 15 actors doing something like 30 characters. That's the kind of thing you'd expect only the National Theatre in London to do, and certainly not for a new playwright."

Upon returning to the East Coast, Urban put in a good word to Simon Kane.

"Given the pressure Simon is under to make sure the first U.S. productions of Sarah's plays are strong, he sometimes asks me what I have heard about a company or a director," Urban says. "In this instance, I had first-hand knowledge of Dave and RG. I made sure Simon knew Rude Guerrilla was a strong theater and that Dave would be a good choice to direct a production of Blasted."

Rude Guerrilla's production of New Jersey Trilogy showcased a true cutting-edge theater company that was fierce, brave and absolutely fearless in its choice and execution of material. Such commitment and devotion would be one thing in London's Soho District or Sloane Square, or in New York's Williamsburg or East Village. It is quite another thing altogether in suburban Orange County, CA.

Watching a Rude Guerrilla production, one could easily believe s/he was in the Royal Court's Jerwood Upstairs, or at 45 Below or LaMaMa in NYC. But to fully appreciate Rude Guerrilla's success, one must understand the atmosphere they work in, a task not easy for theatermakers used to creating and functioning in an environment actively engaged with the political and social forces of the world at large. Orange County, on the other hand, is a place so determinedly isolated from the outside world, it long-ago earned the dubious moniker, "The Orange Curtain."

Works staged by other storefront theaters in Rude Guerrilla's sphere seem as likely to be chosen for the in-house amusement of their own members as for any interest in artistic risk, or even growth. Indeed, a recent scan of local offerings revealed a mostly extraneous blend of exhumed Broadway relics, various TV-spawned irrelevancies, and the warmed-over vanity projects of assorted local "personalities."

Not that this lack of viable choice makes Blasted an easy sell, in either Southern California or New York. Barton is quick to point out that although Rude Guerrilla's growing national reputation was certainly a substantial factor in securing regional premiere rights to the play, the fact that more established, more well-funded L.A. theaters were "scared shitless" of Kane's work didn't hurt. And, although the reviews have been very positive, Barton isn't harboring any illusions of turning a profit on the run. He'll consider himself lucky if he's able to recoup at least some of the show's production budget, which he raised himself through a consortium of independent investors.

"I'm afraid that as one of Sarah's characters says, 'This isn't a story that anyone wants to hear,'" he says with a certain resigned acceptance.

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A continent away, Jon Schumacher feels Dave Barton's pain. Schumacher, of New York's Singularity Company, directed a reading of Blasted at New Dramatists in September, 2003 in hopes of sparking interest that would lead to a New York premiere of the play. Nearly a year later, he's still hoping.

"Several times I was told that Blasted simply did not fit into the 'mission' of various theaters in the City, even those dedicated to new work," says Schumacher. "It also doesn't help that, even though it's a new play, it was written by a British woman ten years ago."

What drives Schumacher on, in the face of such daunting odds, doubts and indifference?

"The compulsion to get this play seen comes from a sort of frustrated idealism about what the theater is and what it can achieve," he says. "I really feel like Sarah Kane is a kindred spirit, and Blasted displays such a prescient view of the world. I had been looking for something that was uniquely political -- but also uniquely theatrical -- and when I discovered this play through (playwright) Christopher Shinn, it became a lightning rod for everything I wanted to do in the theater."

Kane's work has that effect on people, on theater artists, critics and scholars who have experienced her scorching honesty and have responded to it.

"Simon Kane has said in interviews that Sarah was one of the sanest people he knew," says Barton. "While I was never fortunate enough to have met her, it's painfully clear to me that she was just a reporter, her eyes wide open to the realities and despair of the world, which she then reported back to the audience in her own particular voice. I'll always be grateful that she was brave enough to tell it like it is. That's a quality sadly lacking in most playwrights these days."

But fortunately not from Rude G's company of three dozen actors, producers, directors, designers and writers, something a growing community of fans of "theater that matters" has come to appreciate, and expect. And Barton says the company has no plans to move from its Orange County base. Like Social Distortion, The Offspring, and other punk bands that sprang snarling from the barren womb of "The OC," Rude Guerrilla's success in such a staunchly Republican Party stronghold is all the more reason to stay right there.

"The best analogy I can give is one that my favorite theater instructor told me when I was in college," Barton responds when asked where he finds the inspiration to keep going in such a creatively-daunting environment. "'The people may say that they want cake, but that's only because that's all they've ever been given. Give them bread. Once they try it, they'll keep coming back.'"