It's easy to forget, but people are still animals. Underneath all the clothing and rules, the language and tools, we're not that different from our less-civilized ancestors when it comes to primal needs. That's especially true with love and sex, as we can get downright savage in our attempts to procure them. Several of the characters in playwright Patrick Marber's "Closer" make that point explicitly, but it is the implied statements - the play's many different peepholes into the (deeply flawed) human condition - that really give it its punch.

"Closer" won the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and was nominated for a Tony in that category a year later. However, it is probably best known for the 2004 film adaptation, in which American sweethearts Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman played home-wrecking harlots, and well-regarded actors Jude Law and Clive Owen got to spit out all kinds of nasty curses. The movie was fine, but the story works much better as a play. There's no real action, a limited number of settings, and only four characters: Dan (here played by Jonathan Ntheketha), a vaguely self-loathing obituary writer; Alice (Marcy Savastano), a damaged young woman who is equally skilled at reading people and hiding herself; Larry (Michael O'Connor), a rage-prone dermatologist; and Anna (Jill Rittinger), a frigid, divorced photographer.

The play is essentially two hours of these people being terrible to one another, trading places as predator and prey as they get together, get it on, and split apart, all the while uttering some absolutely brutal - and brilliant - dialogue. It is intimate in every sense of the word, and director David Henderson's choice to stage the show in the round at MuCCC, with the audience surrounding the actors on three sides, adds another potent layer of voyeurism to the proceedings.

That point became clear on preview night, as I sat in one of the back pews, just to the left of a trio of friends in the row in front of me, and across from two couples seated on the other side of the stage. As the various scenes unfolded, I noticed that I was paying attention to the rest of the audience's reactions even as I watched the actors at work. What lines were people finding funny? Which situations made my neighbors the most uncomfortable? In a sense, we were all part of the performance. That's especially appropriate for this play, which puts real people's realistically messy lives on display and asks us to stare unflinching at the repercussions.

Actually, it's difficult not to flinch at parts of "Closer." One scene in particular - the first confrontation between Larry and Anna - was so intense that I found my shoulders hiking up around my neck in a subconscious bit of self defense. That's a testament to the work of the superlative cast of this show. Obviously a play like this - light on characters and action, heavy on dialogue and relationships - requires a very strong group of actors, and even the slightest weakness in any one of them can throw the whole thing off. There is nothing weak about any of the portrayals in this play.

As Dan, Jonathan Ntheketha balances the intellectual haughtiness inherent in all writers and the raging insecurities that regularly plague them. His strong initial reactions to Anna at first seem extreme, but as his layers - and bullshit - are slowly pulled away, a reasonable explanation emerges, and Ntheketha maintains his character's consistency even as our opinion of him changes. Jill Rittinger has arguably the most passive role as the usually disaffected Anna, but she is compelling even in her stoicism. Watch her come alive as the rest of the characters draw the venom out of her, forcing her to own up to her own nasty behavior.

Like Ntheketha, Michael O'Connor employs a convincing British accent for his role as Larry, specifically a working-class accent, which is important since class issues underscore almost all of Larry's relationships in the play. Larry's cocky and assured doctor fa�ade crumbles whenever he gets even the inkling that someone thinks he's not good enough, and then he lashes out with barely controlled rage. It takes real skill to believably play a character desperate to keep up a front, and O'Connor has the skill to spare.

But no character in "Closer" puts up more fronts than Alice. Marcy Savastano plays the character from head to toe, wearing multiple shoes with impossibly high heels (the better to suggest she's a big girl) and several different wigs and hairstyles as Alice's mood or partners change. It's easy to trivialize Alice as a broken baby doll, but Savastano doesn't forget that underneath all that coquettish charm there is a cunning survivor, and that Alice is probably the most ruthless character in the story. Savastano brings incredible power to the strip-club scene between Alice and Larry, as she brings the poor bastard to his knees, giving him both everything and nothing that he wants. It's an outstanding scene, brilliantly played by both actors and heightened by Henderson's directorial choices, with the audience barely an arm's length away from either actor. But as Alice says, we're not allowed to touch. As "Closer" proves, we don't need to touch to wound.

"Closer"

By Method Machine

Through December 12

MuCCC, 142 Atlantic Ave.

Thu-Sat 8 p.m. | $10-$20 | muccc.org, methodmachine.org