With the exception of Mr. Luckinbill, who presents a savage portrait of a second-rater, the actors don't convince.

Mr. Blumenthal is at his best in these irresistibly savage portraits of candidates and their campaigns.

"I detest lesbians," she told Ron Geering, her literary executor, in their correspondence about "Dark Places of the Heart," which features a savage portrait of a women's group home in working-class London.

Gibson presents a typically dark and savage portrait of a man who was traumatized by the diphthong at the start of his name, and generally scared of long vowels, which in those days could spring up and attack at any moment.

Simon Callow's portrayal of Colonel Soft, a supercilious United Nations official who cares only that the organization emerge from the crisis without blemish, is a savage portrait of nervous bureaucratic wheeling and dealing that has little regard for the lives being gambled.

At the Arena Stage in Washington, the director JoAnne Akalaitis has taken on Strindberg's great, savage portrait of a poisoned marriage, "The Dance of Death."

He balks, therefore, at his novelists' savage portraits of the bourgeois experience.

"The author creates savage portraits of the sort of people who feel at home in Branston and softer ones of those who are too young or stupid to make a break for it," Marilyn Stasio said here last year.

So was "Marriage of the Blessed," Mohsen Makhmalbaf's savage portrait of the effects of the war, made in 1989.

This kind of frustrated self-searching is something Mr. Rabe can portray most effectively, as he vividly demonstrated in "Hurlyburly," his savage portrait of fear and loathing in Los Angeles from 1984.