NEW YORK, NY.- In a park, at night, as a train screams nearby, the teenagers punch, kick and grapple. They roll over and over, gravel sticking to their rain-soaked clothes, in a terrible embrace, beating one another bloody. “We didn’t want to romanticize it or sugarcoat it or make it easy,” director Danya Taymor said of this scene in the Broadway musical “The Outsiders.” “It felt really important that these moments of violence be terrifying, be brutal.”

“The Outsiders,” nominated for 12 Tony Awards, is based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation. Set to a folk-rock score, it explores the rivalry between the preppy Socs and the blue-collar Greasers, gangs in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma. That enmity explodes in a climactic scene, the rumble, in which the teenagers battle for control of a park. Staging it — in all its horror and cruelty — demands the wholehearted effort of the cast and crew.

The rumble lasts just three minutes, a brief, wordless sequence — scripted by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine and choreographed by brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman — that hurdles from adolescent posturing into existential despair. The characters end up covered in blood, courtesy of blood packs secreted in their costumes and buckets hidden around the stage. “At one point, they got so bloody, we had to pull them back,” said Lillis Meeh, a special effects designer.

Taymor and the Kuperman brothers split the rumble into three acts. It begins with a thunderclap. Lights cut out; rain falls down. Fourteen performers spread out across the stage, silhouetted in pairs and triplets. Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of hell were a visual reference, but the style in this first section is viciously realistic, starved of dance or aesthetic frills. Then a train roars by and, as bars of light cross the stage, the actors form a central scrum.

Time slows down. Each punch reverberates. The performers separate into pairs and grapple as the fight grows hallucinatory, abstract. Finally, they all rise to their feet as the fight becomes a pure nightmare. “All the choices to make it stylized were to feel the brutality of the violence,” Taymor said. “We never wanted the violence to feel beautiful.”

The rumble had to feel as impactful as a punch to the throat, without any underscoring. In “The Outsiders,” music expresses what can’t be uttered. But the violence is already expressive. So the only sounds are the train, the rain and the sonically enhanced punches. Cody Spencer, the sound designer, set speakers around the theater. “We really want to make it feel like you are part of this rumble,” Spencer said.

The lighting and projections magnify the terror. Hana S. Kim’s projections send bars of light across the stage, lending the scene a propulsive quality. Brian MacDevitt’s lights heighten each punch, each strike. The lights hit the actors from the side, brightening at the moment of impact, decaying in time for the next blow. “The light smashes them,” he said. MacDevitt also lights the actors, with a blood-red special, from underneath.

As the characters fight, rain falls, courtesy of two rain bars and two spray heads spraying droplets of varying size. (The goal is to cover every inch of the set without ever flooding the theater.) Kim’s projections and Spencer’s rain sounds enhance the effect. Owing to equity rules and care for the actors, the water is warmed to body temperature. It drains into the floor where it is collected, cleaned and stored.

The set designers and the special effects team tried out several different materials for the stage floor. Some, like dirt, were not hygienic; others, like cork, disintegrated in the rain. They settled on a synthetic rubber used in playgrounds. It cushions the actors and allows them to slip and slide. Installed loosely, it resembles gravel. Underneath are wire mesh, sluice matting and subway grating, which help the rain flow into a drain pan.

After the fight ends, the actors rush offstage to change into fresh clothes. (Later, large fans will dry the stage.) Bloodied clothes are washed, muddied props tidied. During the rumble itself, Taymor likes to watch the audience. “People’s jaws drop,” she said. “I’ve seen people cry during the rumble. I’ve seen people clutching their chests. It’s a collective moment where the audience stops breathing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.