"Etta Jenks," the story of a young woman seduced into the adult entertainment industry, holds plenty of promise to feed our prurient interests and titillate the less noble senses. But surprisingly, the most interesting part of the production is its set.

Scenic designers Andrew Varella and Brittany Paller have built a pipe and wire enclosure that separates the central playing area from the audience that surrounds it. The result makes us all voyeurs at an event that might be a ball game or an extreme cage fight.

Looking across the stage to the opposite side also provokes the disarming question of who is fenced in — the actors or the audience? Clearly, the action about to happen in the center ring may not involve Christians and lions — but it is likely to leave some blood on the floor.

Sadly, that scenic promise is only partially fulfilled.

The 1988 play by Marlane Gomard Meyer is said to focus on male domination and female exploitation. But the production directed by Rikki Jo Hickey in the University of Hawai'i Lab Theatre only nods toward that dark side in its pantomimed prologue and the set changes between scenes.

In those moments, circling dark male silhouettes ominously prowl the perimeter, seeking out weak females that they might cut from the central herd. During the scenes they slink into the periphery, only to rise again in semi-darkness to rearrange set pieces and prey upon one another in stylized choreography.

By comparison, the play's main action is comparatively bubbly.

Lindsay Timmington McGahan takes on the main role, presenting an Etta Jenks who is clearly new in town and something of a corn-fed yokel with a deer-in-the-headlights deficit. She's come to Los Angeles to break into the movies and doesn't have a place to stay.

We've often seen this situation before, but usually in a 1940s musical comedy set on Broadway. What makes "Etta Jenks" different — and hopefully gritty — is that the heroine isn't pulled into stardom from the chorus line, but makes a bundle of bucks working in pornographic film quickies.

Nor is our Etta dewy-eyed. She loves sex and comes on to the first deaf janitor who offers her a place to spend the night (Lavour Vernon Addison, who turns in the show's most powerful monologue as Etta leaves him to advance her career).

"Don't do it for the money," he pleads, "It turns you hard."

"I do it because I'm good at it," is her sunny reply. "It makes me feel like I'm really here."

But after a second act of ethical degradation, a wiser Etta proclaims that to succeed in the business, "you can't love anything," proving, after all, that a life in pornography is dehumanizing.

Kyle David has some good scenes as a sleazy pimp, but the full-on female nudity bathing scene lacks any shred of lusty Molly Bloom scrubbing and substitutes dainty dabbing instead.