Paul Alexander's "Edge" is the latest production by Method Machine, an up-and-coming local art-performance collective that has tasked itself with presenting edgy, challenging works in a variety of nontraditional venues. The group has staged productions in hair salons, nightclubs, and bars, and is now the first to present a show in MuCCC (pronounced "muck"; it stands for multi-use community cultural center), a converted 100-plus-year-old church on Atlantic Avenue in the Neighborhood of the Arts.

MuCCC is the brainchild of Doug Rice, the former head of ArtWalk, who sought to provide a new venue that provides small arts and community groups with a highly flexible space (the stage platform can be moved around the room, as can the church pews used for seating). Although the venue is sparse now and clearly still in the rehabbing phase, it offers a perfect setting for this show, its simple, quaint stained-glass windows framing a woman wrestling with some massive demons.

"Edge" is a one-woman show in which Marcy Savastano portrays poet Sylvia Plath on the last day of her life. It's a little more complicated than that - Plath seems quasi-omniscient, telling the audience details about the future she couldn't possibly know. But essentially, it's Plath explaining the various horrible scenarios in her life that drove her to commit suicide on February 11, 1963. I'm only passingly familiar with Plath's story - I know "The Bell Jar," I know she was a poet, I know she killed herself - so if even half of what is reported in this play is true, I think I would have made an appointment with my oven a good five years before poor Plath did.

At the performance I took in, Savastano started off the play almost manic, bursting with energy and blowing through her lines in a tight, clipped, vaguely aristocratic accent. Given the situation and subject matter, it's an understandable acting choice, but slightly agitating to the audience. After a short time Savastano fell into a more comfortable rhythm, as Plath began recounting the people who shaped her sad, doomed existence, chief among them her allegedly brutal husband, English poet Ted Hughes; a cold, distant father; an overly exacting mother; and a shock-therapy-happy psychiatrist.

Throughout the play, Savastano whirls through fury, bitterness, joy, grief, resentment, self-doubt, passion - you name the emotion, she relays it. Her performance is an acting tour de force; a nearly two-hour soliloquy that truly showcases her considerable abilities as an actress. And she is riveting. Even though the set features only a small desk and chair, David Henderson's direction keeps the action moving, as Savastano moves about the stage, using her limited props to their best advantage, and the lighting changes accentuate the many shifts in emotion.

"Edge" has received only a few showings prior to its staging by Method Machine, but it's a strong work deserving of a larger audience. Alexander accomplishes a great deal here. Although it's a one-woman show, he weaves in multiple viewpoints - Plath reenacts entire conversations with several characters, which lead to some fascinating realizations on her part - and the dialogue is quite strong, doubling back to several key phrases multiple times throughout ("Do you take this man?"; "I am not bitter; I am not a keeper of slights") building to deeper and deeper meanings. You'd think that a play about a woman about to commit suicide would be unrelentingly dreary, but Alexander has Plath delve into deliciously dark humor when the play needs it most, even as she lays her soul increasingly bare.

The strongest facet of the play, however, is how Alexander addresses the biggest, most frustrating question surrounding the suicides of young, vibrant, gifted people: why? Why would someone with a promising writing career, even someone with such a disastrous personal life, choose to snuff it out so early? The answers are all around in "Edge," and by the end of the play you can even begin to justify the most selfish of selfish acts.

The most heartbreaking scene, for me, is when Plath recalls the death of her father, a brilliant academic who succumbed to a fairly treatable disease, diabetes. She rails against her father, his doctors, God, evoking the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," wondering why so many smart people couldn't put her broken father back together again. The parallels to Plath's own life, with her history of depression and mental illness, are clear, and it makes her pain over the unnecessary loss of her father more brutally ironic. It's a well-written scene brilliantly acted by Savastano, and just one of the many excellent moments "Edge" has to offer.

Edge

By Method Machine

Through March 28

MuCCC, 142 Atlantic Ave.

$12-$15 | 244-0960, methodmachine.org