Despite the warning that the show you are about to watch will contain graphic content, gunfire, cigarette smoke, and strobe lights, you will be shocked by what you see in That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play, prolific playwright Sheila Callaghan’s latest work and Strand Theater founder and artistic director Jayme Kilburn’s last show with the company. (Producer, writer, and performer Rain Pryor will be taking over as artistic director, while Elena Kostakis, former executive director of the Baltimore Theater Alliance, will become managing director.) There isn’t a plot, per se, at least not in the sense of one scene leading logically to another. But the basic outline—like, bare-bones basic—goes like this: Former strippers Valerie (Kerry Brady) and Agnes (Joanna Maria Fortuna) keep a blog on which they post horrifyingly disinterested photos of raunchy men they kill in seedy motel rooms. In an unrelated but parallel motel room, screenwriter Owen (R. Brett Rohrer) struggles to finish a script, and finds inspiration in the girls’ blog. He’s brought his buddy Rodney (Jimmy Heyworth) along for the ride, and Rodney uses the opportunity to indulge in some sadistic, graphic douchebaggery, like pressuring a hotel maid to come back to their room later and “change the sheets.”

You could be forgiven, though, for not understanding that this is what’s going on. The show doesn’t so much start as explode into action, Valerie and Agnes returning to their motel room after a night out, Valerie in patterned neon leggings and a leather vest, Agnes in a blue sequined tube dress pulled down to reveal a bra covered with sparkling rhinestones. Agnes is a fireball, screaming and rubbing her ass all over the john (also played by Heyworth) who’s ordered the two girls for the night. Agnes distracts him with her body while Valerie grabs a gun and mercilessly, thoughtlessly, kills him with a single shot to the skull. After they take their pictures, Valerie starts to upload them to the blog while Agnes engages in general debauchery, pissing the motel room bed and petulantly (and loudly) whining that she’s hungry.

It all starts to unravel from there. The clever staging utilizes two platforms facing each other, representing the two motel rooms, with the audience lined up on either side (which allows you to watch your fellow audience members’ shocked faces). One, where the first scene plays out, is painted a loud pink, with various weapons stuck to the wall; the other is a drab brown. If you’re sharp, you start to tease out that the pink room is fantasy, the brown reality. And so, while Owen generally exists in the real world, he and Rodney occasionally cross into the mindfuck of the alternate world—like in the second scene, in which the first murder is repeated with the roles reversed, ending with Owen hacking Agnes to pieces and ramming a sledgehammer between her legs. Afterward, Owen, back in his room, wonders aloud if the sledgehammer was too much for his script.

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