Cheating hearts, wayward bodies, jealous fits and dark revenge -- those are the stuff of Jacobean revenge tragedy, but you can see why they turned Dan Jemmett's mind to country-western music. The result is "Dog Face," Jemmett's streamlined version of a bloody 1622 tragi-comedy, set to an insinuating old-time jukebox.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Lissa Brennan is Beatrice-Joanna and Brian Barefoot is her husband, Alsemero, in Quantum Theatre's production of "Dog Face." Click photo for larger image. "Dog Face" Where: Quantum Theatre at the Heppenstall Plant, 44th and Hatfield streets, Lawrenceville. When: Through April 3; 8 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Tickets: $20-$25; 412-394-3353. Previous story Stage Preview: Tale of lust and revenge takes a Quantum leap from Paris to Pittsburgh

Streamlined speaks for the company, too. "Dog Face" is performed by a compact cast of two men and three women, apparently an itinerant acting troupe who've parked their small house trailer, spread some sawdust, unloaded their prop chest and jukebox and strung up a curtain and a few colored lights.

To start, the cast swaggers right up to the audience and sizes us up, deadpan, shrewd. "We know you," they seem to say. "You're in this, too."

It ends the same way, 95 minutes later, as the last country lament whines gradually away, the air thick with desolation. Nor do the actors soften during the curtain call: These guys have attitude.

With what they go through, they earn it. As the central couple spirals down through lust, perversion and murder, they seem almost to move upward, as though navigating a labyrinthine moral landscape by Escher, where you descend up to hell in an ecstatic apotheosis.

You know the play is special to start, because this is Karla Boos' Quantum Theatre, where location informs art. "Dog Face" is enacted in a giant industrial cathedral, the empty Heppenstall Plant in Lawrenceville. Past the tawdry pit of sawdust, the vista passes a giant crane into a plaintive, endless dark in which you might imagine the ghosts of toil and strife.

This is raw theater, with its tattoos and underwear in view. But it is very knowing in intention and effect.

Jemmett has taken "The Changeling," a famous revenge tragedy of murderers and madmen set in Spain by Shakespeare's contemporaries Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, and stripped away the antic madhouse subplot. With it goes the title character.

What's left is the tale of a maiden, Beatrice-Joanna, in love with one man but forced by her father to marry another. She gets DeFlores, a grotesque servant she taunts as Dog Face, to kill her fiance, then discovers that his passion demands erotic reward. His repellent passion awakens something in her, so I guess she's the changeling, now. With her fiance out of the way, she marries her favorite, but then he has suspicions, as does the noble brother of the murdered man, and there's a maid to murder, too ...

If it sounds sort of funny, it is. Some humor is in the text, such as the virginity test Beatrice-Joanna must contrive to pass. Much is in the bold strokes of Jemmett's adaptation, which might be called melodramatic vaudeville, sour-sweetened by generous helpings of Johnny Cash. And some is in the performance, especially the twangy-voiced, mustachioed father played by Sheila McKenna, who sings a funny ballad of her own composing ("the buzzing in my head is either alcohol or dread"), and in the contrasting brothers played by Laurie Klatscher.

Why do women play these roles? Because that's who the acting troupe has on hand, I guess, and because Jemmett trusts us to keep two things in our heads at once -- to enjoy the sheer artifice, to be both sucked in and wised up. The play's fortress has become a dumpy trailer, but heartache is just as intense in a diner as a palace.

The show comes at us fast, the actors waiting in full view, rushing in as needed. But it also stops to savor Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.

It's grisly-funny stuff, as Jacobean theater can be. The sex is more rutting than romance. There's nudity, blood and more than one theatrical effect to make you gasp.

The casting discovery is Lissa Brennan, whom we have never seen like this. She is a potent presence, flaxen hair flowing, strong and often shrill -- a biker babe or renegade goddess. This Beatrice-Joanna is no simple maiden. But when Brennan looks the audience in the eye, your heart yearns at the naked teenager in her eyes.

John Fitzgerald Jay, a Canadian, plays DeFlores with a neurotic array of awkward tics that gradually reveal the driven beast within, then ratchet up to earn perverse sympathy. Brian Barefoot is whippet-strong as the suspicious husband, and Laurie Klatscher creates not only two very different brothers (geek and hidalgo) but also a tousle-brained maid. And McKenna manages to be simultaneously self-parodic and serious.

Tony Ferrieri worked with Jemmett on the environmental set, and C. Todd Brown's lights bring the vastness alive. Richard Parsakian's costume design is not Jacobean silks and satins but country-western synthetics and sateen. For Beatrice-Joanna, he provides shape-clinging dresses tracking her from virginal white to ambiguous cream to lustful red to tragic black.

In spite of the comedy and heart-tugging music, "Dog Face" feels as inevitable as Greek tragedy as it spirals up to its grand, inevitable perversity.

Go warmly dressed; bring gloves; they hand out blankets.