The tiny stage at the Yellow Brick Studio works to the advantage of The Actors' Group new production, "P.S. Your Cat Is Dead." It turns the audience into a group of intimate voyeurs.

The 1970 play by James Kirkwood, who had better success writing the book for "A Chorus Line," features a prolonged scene of a bare-bottomed male tied over a kitchen sink and the dominant underlying theme of homosexual sadomasochism. But this is a comedy in which we are asked to accept the situation as the manic acting-out by an otherwise normal poor sap who has reached the end of his rope.

The central character of Jimmy (played a bit too manically by Kris DeRego) has just been fired from an acting job on New Year's Eve, finds his girlfriend moving out of his apartment, and discovers a burglar ransacking his place for the third time in two months.

The ultimate injury is that his cat has just died from a kidney infection.

Pushed to this extreme, Jimmy improbably knocks out and hog-ties the burglar (Deneb Catalan), then cuts off his pants with a pair of kitchen scissors. Where, indeed, is this storyline headed?

Maybe it leads to self-discovery, shared humanity, and the ultimate resiliency of the human spirit. Well, it might, if we could just get past our doubts about Jimmy's suddenly aberrant behavior. On that point, DeRego's performance isn't convincing.

It's a tough role. We're asked to immediately accept an extreme Jimmy without having first experienced a normal Jimmy. We're expected to sort through his bizarre behavior and see him as a regular, straight-laced actor and writer. We're to assume that the normal Jimmy would find the crazed Jimmy just as off-putting as we do.

That's simply too much to ask from the audience in this production. We see Jimmy as hopelessly manipulated — first by the playwright, then by the actor, and lastly by the show's director, Dennis Proulx.

Once he relieves the burglar of his pants, Jimmy uses the occasion to rant about his life's bad luck. He drinks, he barks into the telephone to his concerned aunt and girlfriend, and he torments his charge by feeding him cat food. Jimmy is not an easy guy to like.

Conversely, as the play moves along, Catalan's Vito the burglar is much easier to like, despite his jumping through character hoops laid out by the playwright. He's first the tough guy, then the whining captive, and — in a surprise move — kisses Jimmy on the cheek when he gets too close.

Vito is gay, or at least bi-sexual, still suffering from the premature death of the love of his life, an accomplished architect. Improbably, Vito begins to charm Jimmy, then tries to seduce him, and ultimately pursues him with the headlong dedication of a puppy in love with his master's leg.

Catalan makes most of this acceptable, although we suspect that it's only the frightful weather that makes sharing a bed with Jimmy a possible alternative.

While the character of Vito offers some warmth, the P.S. on this production is that it leaves too much of its butt hanging out.