SINNER, Campbell Hall, USBC, Santa Barbara, California

Hands up if you twitch when you watch dance live. I admit I'm liable to spasm involuntarily from the audience. I always figured it was about being a dancer myself; like a sleeping dog dreaming of chasing a cat, I'd find my restless limbs trying to recreate the physical thrill of the image before me. This time, though, I'm not so sure it was an empathetic impulse that stirred me in my seat.

SINNER unsettled me. Ben Payne's sharp-tongued text was as ugly as an Irving Welsh novel; urban, gritty, obscene, its dialogue by turns cutesy, hackneyed and melodramatic. Yet from the mouths of performers Liam Steel and Ben Wright, those words were frighteningly believable. SINNER was conceived around the story of the Soho (London) bomber, 23-year-old David Copeland, who cited homophobia and racism as his impetus for planting nail bombs that killed three people.

Set on a dark stage littered with upset chairs, the story of SINNER is one of lost souls in an urban jungle — of young men searching for something they desperately want, but can't name. Clad in metro gear and toting black duffel bags, Steel and Wright became potential killers — their puppy-dog playfulness and fluid, nimble contact improv only heightening the horror of what might lie beneath.

Despite the company's name, dance they do, though they parody dance as well. This was witty, intricately choreographed, insistently physical theater thrashed out by bad boys — reminiscent of Fight Club, only funnier and more frightening. Their tense and claustrophobic flirtation hooked me with its humor, disarmed me with its tenderness, and then made me writhe in discomfort. "To feel something for other people, even if it's hate, feels like something," Wright intoned, looming behind Steel to rub his shoulders, univited. It was these intensely charged exchanges — fleeting moments of insistent, desperate contact and anxious attempts at escape — that mesmerized. Though Steel performed his original role for this US premiere of the work, Wright was brought in to fill the place of Rob Tannion, Stan's other artisitic director. It's hard to imagine a physical chemistry more convincingly fraught than the one these two produced.

Ultimately, SINNER struck at the roots of identity itself. Passivity revealed itself as festering hatred, cockiness as impotence. As Marilyn Manson's music blared, Steel adopted his own personal Jesus complex, good and evil collapsed, and one man nailed another to a table with brutal resolve.

Ouch.