Lusty soap operas about the crazy ways of sneaky, unwashed hillbillies have gone missing on New York stages in recent years. In olden days, when “Tobacco Road” ruled Broadway in the 1930s, slick urbanites couldn’t get enough of such moonshine. But now, except for those occasions when Tracy Letts (“Killer Joe”) is feeling folksy and perverse, that genre has been reduced to festering on reality television.  So hats off (preferably accessorized with bullet holes and grease stains) to Keith Josef Adkins, who has reclaimed this rich and odoriferous territory for the stage with “Pitbulls.” This resplendently foul-mouthed production at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater dares to present, as one character says, “trailer trash in its natural habitat.”  That’s Virgil (Billy Eugene Jones), the mean and blackmailing sheriff, speaking to our defiant heroine, Mary (Yvette Ganier), who is the object of desire, fear and derision of many a soul in the Ohio River valley woods where she parks her rusting trailer. Mary is a maker of “real grape wine” (secret ingredient: her own blood), which she has her overgrown son, Dipper (Maurice Williams), sell to passing cars on the offramp.  Rumor has it that she has her boy doing other, awful things, too, like burning American flags on the Fourth of July and killing pit bulls. In an early scene that made me think I definitely wasn’t wasting my time by attending this play, Mary asks to sniff her son’s fingers for the smell of smoke to see if he has performed as commanded. It’s a request to which Dipper responds, with terse eloquence, “Weird.”  But who really killed Heaper, the pit bull whose mangled head shows up in a bowling bag, remains a mystery until the show’s end. The slaying has far-reaching implications on this Fourth of July, when the mayor’s annual Summit of the Pitbulls (in which the creatures fight to the death) takes place, and the town has hopes of positioning itself as the pit bull capital of the world  Directed by Leah C. Gardiner, this premiere of “Pitbulls” can feel overly relaxed when you want it to burn with creepy urgency. A tauter, more tensely acted production might help you overlook some plot holes and some symbolic poeticizing that’s tacked on toward the end. (It becomes clear that the fighting of pit bulls is a metaphor for the internecine struggles of poor, rural African-Americans like these.)  But it has many of the requisite accouterments that make trailer-trash melodrama such guilty fun, including a set by Andrew Boyce that features a corroded washing machine sitting in the woods and a central performance of heroic blowsiness by Ms. Ganier. And the dialogue is as flavorful as pulled-pork barbecue marinated in a piquant secret sauce.  This is a play in which a lay minister (Nathan Hinton) catalogs the “normal, everyday sins” he’s committed as including “gambling, drunkenness and sex in a state park with a cousin.” His jealous wife (Donna Duplantier) warns Mary, “You better keep your sticky hands off my husband, or I’ll sic Christ on you.”  The play goes a bit saggy and sentimental at its end. But it’s hard to discount the linguistic verve that features the, uh, resonant description of a Pitbull Summit past, “when a pit gave birth to a double-headed puppy right under the flag — afterbirth just sitting there, cooking in the sun.”  By Keith Josef Adkins; directed by Leah C. Gardiner; sets by Andrew Boyce; costumes by Dede Ayite; lighting by Eric Southern; sound by Bart Fasbender; fight director, UnkleDave’s Fight-House; production manager, Jeremy Duncan Pape; production stage manager, Theresa Flanagan. Presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, David Van Asselt, artistic director; Brian Long, managing director. At the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place, at 11th Street, Greenwich Village, 866-811-4111, rattlestick.org. Through Dec. 13. Running time: 2 hours.  WITH: Donna Duplantier (Rhonda), Yvette Ganier (Mary), Nathan Hinton (Wayne), Billy Eugene Jones (Virgil) and Maurice Williams (Dipper).  A version of this review appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Poor, Violent and Up for a Dogfight. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Who killed a fighting dog? That’s the mystery involving a sheriff and a backwoods winemaker in “Pitbulls,” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.