Crowded Fire's Bereaved hawks drugs! nudity! absurdity!

You know you've got your audience right where you want them when they're laughing at the rape fantasy being played out – rather graphically and violently – on stage. It's easy to imagine an audience sitting in wide-eyed horror as the scene, which also involves black face, goes to some surprising places.

But by this point in Thomas Bradshaw's The Bereaved, a Crowded Fire Theater production at the Thick House on Potrero Hill, we've come to expect the outrageous, the politically incorrect, the shocking.