This 1992 dark comedy goes all Quentin Tarantino in Jerry Springer country, portraying sex and violence in a rural Texas trailer park. Chris (Matt Saunders) faces trouble from a drug dealer because Mom stole his coke. He proposes to dad Ansel (Pearce Bunting, making a spectacular Philadelphia return) that they hire a dirty cop, Killer Joe (tightly wound John Lumia), to off Mom for a cut of her life insurance policy, made out to Chris' little sister Dottie (Amanda Schoonover). She's one of those ethereal simpletons who always perceive more than everybody else.

Hilarious trailer park etiquette debates—should Ansel's wife Sharla (Mary Lee Bednarek) have answered the door without pants when Chris knocked? "She didn't know who it was!" Ansel argues—yield to serious negotiation when Killer Joe arrives, mythically costumed in black cowboy hat and black trench coat. He won't work on spec, but will accept a retainer: Dottie.

Schoonover brilliantly plays the childlike adult who's "not like other people." She walks and talks in her sleep and sees into souls, telling Killer Joe, "Your eyes hurt." His courtship of Dottie—a pathetically awkward yet almost sweet seduction—makes Joe a family member. But business comes first: "I'm the customer," whines Chris, trying to renege on the deal to protect his sister.

Killer Joe races along on its violence, nudity, profanity and outrageousness so well in this superb production—played on Saunders' realistically tacky trailer set, lit by Joshua Schulman, and costumed by Rosemarie McKelvey—that we hardly think about how often we've seen this story before.

Greed plus stupidity equals a bloody finale, expertly staged by John Bellomo, who makes the violence both sickeningly real and cinematically clever. Director Joe Canuso and his terrific cast spare us no rawness, from Ansel's graying underwear, potbelly and beer-soaked spinelessness and Sharla's unchecked libido to the painful mix of Chris' casual violence and youthful naivety—and, as with a gruesome car wreck, we can't look away. Only the killer and the simpleton have any ethical grounding, though they're both completely bugfuck, so we can't help but cheer them on.

KILLER JOE

Through May 28, Theatre Exile, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-922-4462 or www.theatreexile.org