TORONTO - Dealing as it does with such delicate issues as drug abuse, alcoholism and teen sexuality, all mixed up in a fetid and funky Oedipal stew, That Face is not an easy play to watch.

And frankly, it would be a much better production if it were even more difficult to watch.

The play marks an impressive debut from an exciting new playwright, Polly Sternham -- a 23-year-old Brit who wrote this complex script when she was but a sprite of 19, a fact that that certainly didn't impede its progress through the stage of the prestigious Royal Court Theatre and a commercial run in London's West End.

Now it has crossed the pond, finding safe harbour of sorts on the stage of the Berkeley Street Theatre in a co-production of Nightwood Theatre (using it to launch the new, ongoing 4 x 4 Festival of women directors) and the Canadian Stage Company.

Ultimately, however, in a production directed by Kelly Thornton, one is forced to conclude that it has perhaps found too safe a harbour, for in bringing this compelling black comedy to life on a satisfyingly functional set created by Teresa Przybylski, Thornton and her cast play far too much to the comedy, allowing the blackness to fade to a less-than-compelling shade of grey.

It starts promisingly, as two young co-eds in an upscale private British boarding school prepare to torture one of their younger classmates.

The ringleader here is the lovely, heartless Izzy (played by Athena Karkanis), but the one who almost does in the hooded young victim (Teresa Labriola in a thankless role) is Izzy's sidekick, the cheerily psychopathic Mia (played by Bethany Jillard), who has drugged the young woman to a level that is almost lethal.

That's enough to get the two young women suspended. From there, the action cuts to Mia's home base, if not her home -- a gritty flat just big enough for her elder brother Henry (played by Kristopher Turner) and the children's alcoholic, pill-popping mother, Martha (played by Sonja Smits).

It has been the family seat, it seems, for the past half decade, ever since Hugh (Nigel Bennett), the children's father and Martha's ex-husband, abandoned them all in favour of a new love interest on the other side of the world.

In that time, anything remotely resembling normal lines of familial affection have blurred to the point where Henry has been forced to act not only as his mother's keeper, but her boy toy as well.

The news of Mia's impending expulsion, however, brings Hugh rushing home from abroad and into the uncomfortable role of pater familias -- a role he has heretofore tried to play with his cheque book -- and the truth-telling begins.

In a play that casts the two children in this family as more adult than their parents, it seems sort of ironic and a trifle counter-productive that Thornton has chosen to cast as those children two two young actors who are far more skilled than the actors playing their parents.

While Jillard and, most particularly, Turner do an impressive job of illustrating and then inhabiting the distorted shapes into which love can be twisted, Smits and Bennett seem more than a trifle unwilling to get their psyches dirty by exploring the furthest depths of their characters' monumental self-absorption, contenting themselves with emotional surfing instead.

Thanks to them, That Face just doesn't wear the look of horror -- or the look of truth -- that the playwright deserves.

The 4 x 4 Festival continues with Yellowman, opening in the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs on Wednesday, as well as No Exit (opening at Buddies In Bad Times) and serious money (at Theatre Passe Muraille) later in the month.

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