In Alan Cumming’s solo directorial debut, Cumming plays John Vandermark, a failed composer turned music teacher with a weakness for impoverished young men of great aspirations. When handsome dilettante Sebastian St. Germain (David Boreanaz, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) enters his life claiming to be a novelist, John is stirred to help him in any way he can. But John soon grows bitter when his charity is abused. The final blow comes with the discovery that every woman in town is getting a piece of Sebastian with not a scrap left over for his gracious host. John’s panic at being duped, his bitterness and rage at his own lack of success and his gnawing sense of impotency over his unrequited love sends him into a violent turmoil.

What ensues is a malevolent comic bow to the Grand Guignol, offering a fresh twist on the hustler/john power dynamic. With echoes of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and the Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter ’60s film classic The Servant, the edgy and stylish Suffering Man’s Charity is teeming with juicy theatrical brio and offers fierce performances from both Boreanaz and the inimitable chameleon Cumming. Henry Thomas, impressively suave, costars, with spirited cameos from Anne Heche, Karen Black, Carrie Fisher, and Jane Lynch.