COOS BAY — Jake can’t find his pants.

He hasn’t seen them for weeks, and he blames his mother.

There are many, many things for which she can rightfully be blamed — and she may well have hidden the pants — but when a grown man (albeit disturbed) goes undressed for so long, the excuse hardly flies.

In a play where everyone is damaged and most are broken, there is much blame to go around, but it’s rarely directed in the right place. There’s also buckets of crazy, coming in more varieties than Kentucky Fried Chicken, in a “A Lie of the Mind,” which opens tonight at Southwestern Oregon Community College.

Director Rob Clingan said he wanted to do a Sam Shepard play with a significant number of female parts.

“I haven’t ever lived in his world,” he said of the playwright’s gritty dramas. “I thought it was about time.”

As is common for Southwestern productions, the set occupies only a portion of the stage and is encircled by the audience seats, assuring no safe distance can be had from the intense action unfolding.

It begins with Jake (Nathan Andreasen), hands bloody, claiming to have killed his wife, in a frantic phone call to his brother from a roadside stop. It’s not the first time he’s made such a call; Frankie (Sean Kelly) notes Jake has believed she was dead before as a result of his abuse.

Elsewhere, alive but in bad shape, Beth (Alecia Gatlin) wakes up in her hospital room but doesn’t recognize her brother. Mike (Robert Marchant) considers this normal for someone who has suffered a brain injury. Or maybe it’s just normal, as several other characters exhibit great difficulty keeping track of their relations.

Jake recounts how Beth’s acting job, and the effort she put into looking good for it, made him jealous. He mentions having done jail time for her, and Frankie suggests the problem goes much further back, reminding Jake of an incident with his pet goat while they were growing up in a rural area of southern California.

Beth remains hostile to her brother and seems to want Jake back. As she appears to make small steps toward recovery, Jake’s condition deteriorates. He stops eating and speaking, leading Frankie to bring in reinforcements.

Anyone wondering how these people got to be so messed up, after meeting their parents, may wonder how they turned out so well. Next to Jake’s mother, Lorraine (Annie McAleer), Britney Spears looks like Mother of the Year.

“She deserved it,” Lorraine says at the news of Beth’s possible death, after knocking Frankie down and saying she forgot Jake was married. “Jake was never fit to live with a woman, and any woman who would live with a man like that deserves it.”

Frankie and sister Sally (Amy Katrina) plead with her to get Jake a doctor, but she insists on taking him home. Out of genuine concern for their brother, Frankie and Sally would be more comfortable with him in a padded room, but almost any alternative would be preferable to leaving him in their mother’s care.

Beth’s parents, Baylor (Levi Goodman) and Meg (Mimi Maddess), make a 500-mile journey from their Montana ranch to visit her hospital room, but when she fails to wake up in the 15 minutes he allotted for the visit, Baylor is eager to get on with his day. He orders Meg around enough to show where Beth learned to be a victim, then leaves. And, of course, neither has any idea who Jake is.

They’re all awful people — including Jake’s dad, an alcoholic who died years ago, hit by a truck while lying in the road in a drunken stupor — but there’s always more to the story, and the chronic hurtfulness of these families suggests there are four sets of unseen grandparents who are in it just as deep.

But despite their horrific first impressions, Jake and Lorraine don’t even need sympathetic  backstories. Their pain is so close to the surface it’s self-evident. There are no villains among these compelling characters. It’s worth finding out why she coddles Jake and treats Sally with such hostility.

Mike’s rage is typical of a male relative of an abuse victim, but more mysterious is Baylor’s profound detachment. His bluntness could be taken as stoicism — life’s tough, so move on — but it goes so far he seems detached from reality. He regrets the burden of having a family to take care of while the aches and pains of his age leave him unable to take care of himself and almost totally dependent on them.

After Frankie arrives in Montana to try to make things right with Beth’s family, Beth appears well for a moment, then regresses when a comment triggers her memory. It’s hard to assess what she was like before brain damage, but Jake’s jealousy may have been well grounded, although that wouldn’t have made a difference — he was never rational.

Back home, Jake remains jealous because he thinks Frankie is going after Beth — who he still believes is dead. He insists he’s going to do something about it, but it will be difficult for him to travel across several states wearing cotton briefs and an American flag, as Sally points out.

Sally, the sanest member of either family, is not without her baggage, but somehow she carries it better than anyone else. This may have something do with her mother’s observation that she hasn’t ever had a man. But if anyone here must reproduce, it should be her.

The show runs through March 8, with performances at 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 2. Tickets are $8, $6 for seniors and free for students.