The milk of human kindness has all but evaporated from the charnel-house world conjured by Suzan-Lori Parks in her gripping new play at the Public Theater. Blood practically runs through the gutters of this grim dystopia, described in reductive terms as "a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere" but presumably meant to be interpreted as a nightmare-future microcosm of a rather large country that's all too familiar.

Yet the relentless bleakness of Parks' writing here is allied to an unmistakable theatrical vitality. And it is enhanced by Michael Greif's razor-sharp production. Dark and death-haunted as it is, the play simmers with life. It holds you in its intense grip from the first grisly images, of a woman washing blood off her hands, to its still bloodier finale. It's only as the theatrical force of such images begins to fade from the mind that the play's flaws -- primarily the blurriness of its tragic vision -- begin to nag at you.

S. Epatha Merkerson gives a restrained, quietly affecting performance as the central character, back-alley abortionist Hester Smith. The first name is borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, of "The Scarlet Letter," and Hester Smith likewise has an A emblazoned on her chest -- burned into her flesh by the government.

She was forced into this disreputable, borderline-illegal line of work by a tragedy in her past: While she was scrubbing floors for the "Rich" family, her young son was caught stealing meat. He's been in prison ever since, and Hester's one wish is to earn enough money to buy his freedom -- and maybe to see the Mayor's wife, formerly the little girl who snitched on her son, get her comeuppance.

In a way, the woman is already getting it. In Parks' disturbing but persuasively defined world, women are punished for both their fertility and their infertility. They're forced to undergo brutal, unsanitary abortions, but the Mayor's wife is ridiculed and threatened with death unless she provides an heir. She's hollow-eyed and desperate with fear (Michole Briana White captures her caged-cat tenseness brilliantly), virtually a slave to the preening peacock of a Mayor -- the play's figure of complete and completely corrupt authority -- played with cartoonish machismo by Bobby Cannavale.

He's not so secretly carrying on with the play's third major female character, a prostitute, Canary Mary (Daphne Rubin-Vega, marvelously cynical and voluptuous). Like Hester, Canary performs "one of those disreputable but most necessary services" and is held in contempt for it. Hester and Canary lapse into an unknown tongue when they exchange bitter remarks about the Mayor's wife's infertility (the exchanges are translated into English and projected above the stage). Official opprobrium seems to have attached itself to all matters relating to female sexuality, so this secret slang, called "the talk," has evolved to deal with them.

A necessary, light-giving streak of humor slips into the play via this peculiarly conceived language. Certain English words are retained, so that the sentence "when her period comes she is in hysterics" is translated as "falltima ovo ella Greek tragedy woah-ya."

Another leavening touch of humor, not to mention the soothing balm of music, can be found in some of the songs that Parks has composed to flesh out the characters and their dilemmas. The Mayor sings a jaunty tune celebrating his sperm count, but most of the songs are aching, bluesy laments with distinct overtones of Brecht and Weill, in which the oppressed sing of their oppression. Their lyrics are crude, if sometimes sourly funny, but the haunting melodies are well-turned, and they flesh out the play's stark texture, stripping some of the bitter taste from its action.

Such diversions hold our attention as Parks brings together the separate strands of her plot. When Hester finally secures the money for a "reunion picnic," the surly young man she sees rejects her tender advances; it turns out he's not even her son. "You know how many men and women they got locked up?" Canary remarks in one of the play's more pointedly topical lines. "More than's walking free in the streets, that's how many. It's a wonder they ain't lost 'em all."

Meanwhile, an escaped convict named Monster (Mos Def) has been hanging around town, trying to evade a trio of comically bloodthirsty bounty hunters who clamber around the outer edges of Mark Wendland's aptly ominous set. When he gets the Mayor's wife pregnant, the stage is set for Hester's bloody revenge, although it is followed instantly by a kind of retribution no less harrowing, and no less sanguinary.

Greif does his finest work in years here, eliciting fully realized performances even from actors in relatively minor roles. The text is composed of many brief scenes, but Greif keeps the pacing at a steady boil. His taut direction ideally serves the leanness of Parks' writing here, so different from the freewheeling abundance of last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, "Topdog/Underdog." Wendland's set, the harsh lighting of Kenneth Posner and Ilona Somogyi's costumes all contribute to the sure theatrical realization of this grimly conceived world, a place where, as Hester says, "There ain't no winning."

Almost all benevolent human impulses, from sexuality to mother love to brotherhood, have been corrupted and cheapened, stamped out or quickly inverted into their opposite. Her son's "goodness," to which Hester desperately clings, has become badness. Hester's maternal love is warped into a vengeful need to deny another woman the same satisfaction.

But as we watch almost all of the play's characters engage in acts of brutality, some question arise: Where does all this inhumanity come from? What forces have brought this world into being? And, more germanely, what significance can it have for us? Similar questions were subtly but suggestively answered in Caryl Churchill's "Far Away," another recent play that describes a harsh destiny for a corrupt human race. But here the answers remain obscure and sketchy, although Parks' style is far less subtle than Churchill's. The play's ethos is seemingly summed up best in a character's nihilistic comment that "bad things happen every day."

We can extrapolate some glints of larger significance. The harsh attitude toward the A-word depicted here are but an exaggeration of the reigning American party's current policy. One might infer that Parks is suggesting that to deny women this freedom over their bodies is to take the first step upon a path that leads to this hellish world, where civil rights are seemingly non-existent. The Kafka-esque picture of a grotesquely engorged prison system obviously has some parallels with current American culture. And the Mayor, the all-powerful leader who nevertheless must give the people exactly what they want, is a pointedly satiric figure. But these ideas are never knit together to form a persuasive, cohesive viewpoint.

Above all the play condemns the evil of injustice, and its monstrous consequences. The idea is most potently -- and literally -- illustrated in the case of Monster, whose former name was the equally generic Boy. The play's single most terrifying -- and powerful -- moment finds the beaten and bloody ex-convict singing his solo song, "The Making of a Monster." Mos Def, the rapper who turns in another utterly captivating performance here, following his superb one in "Topdog," seethes the words more than he sings them: "You'd think it would take/So much work to create/The Devil incarnate/It's easy. ... A small bit of hate in a heart will inflate/And that's more so much more than enough/to make you a monster."

The play could use more of such chilling clarity. As it is, the vision of human cruelty and suffering it presents is powerful, but too vague and diffuse -- and thus too easy to experience as mere nihilism. The play's vision is so bleak it cuts itself off from having larger resonance -- it's a capital-A allegory that frustrates interpretation. Parks' tragic vision never comes into sharp focus.

--Charles Isherwood VARIETY

"Rubin-Vega, not incidentally to what's best about this play, is as bouncy a girl in the yellow dress as the one in the long running musical Contact."

--CURTAIN UP

"...the sexy and honest-as-hell Canary Mary (Daphne Rubin-Vega, delightfully street-smart as always)."

--David Finkle

"...heartbreakingly effective; so, too, is Daphne Rubin-Vega's riveting portrayal of Hester's best friend Canary, a compassionate yet pragmatic woman who is the mistress of the Mayor."

--Martin Denton NYTHEATRE.COM

"...Rubin-Vega is voluptuous and enrapturing as Canary Mary."

--Matthew Murray

"Ever a charmer, Daphne Rubin-Vega pertly flounces about as Hester's best friend."

--Michael Sommers STAR-LEDGER STAFF