On Theater: Five dramas that light up Off-Broadway

It seems perverse to say this while the busy Broadway season is cresting toward the Tony Awards, but I've just had a terrific time on five consecutive days Off-Broadway - much better than most I've had on Broadway in months.

This is a thrill, really, not to mention a relief and a re-energizer after a season of middling new plays on Broadway and off. Here are five articulate, substantial, wildly unpredictable dramas, impeccably cast and directed, each taking audiences to places we never even knew we wanted to go.

Three are original voices unknown in New York - Chloë Moss and Polly Stenham from London, Kristoffer Diaz from Chicago. The familiar ones, Claudia Shear and Adam Rapp, are tackling provocative subjects from surprising angles. And, as a bonus but not as casting gimmicks, two have lured Edie Falco (Moss' "This Wide Night") and Billy Crudup (Rapp's "The Metal Children") back to work for bus fare and challenging roles that deserve them.

Here are the five, in the order in which I saw them. (Choosing favorites is up to you.)

THAT FACE

Polly Stenham was all of 19 in 2007, when she wrote this visceral, elegant British hit about a family too cruel and fascinating to be lumped into the category of the merely dysfunctional.

Laila Robins is scary and irresistible as the slinky, deeply disturbed mother of her beloved caretaker son (the astonishing Christopher Abbott) and her unloved daughter (the equally compelling Cristin Milioti). As the son desperately tries to get his addicted mum on her feet, the daughter has been banished to boarding school, where she commits unspeakable so-called pranks with a gorgeous sociopath friend (Betty Gilpin). Sarah Benson, the daring artistic director of Soho Rep, moves uptown to prove again that she is a master of erotic menace and crushing cruelty. Stenham's ending leans a bit hard on Tennessee Williams, but the unflinching, stylish writing and psychological portraiture are all her own.

Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St., $75, 212-581-1212 or manhattantheatre club.com.

THIS WIDE NIGHT

Edie Falco and Alison Pill are quietly riveting in Chloë Moss' small two-character study of women who shared a cell and friendship in prison and bounce off one another's uneasiness after their release.

Falco plays a frumpy, needy British middle-age woman - a jittery, hard-to-read person from a different planet than has supported Carmela Soprano or Nurse Jackie. Pill, transformed from her powerful, short-lived embodiment of Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker," plays the younger half of this memorable duet. Despite her youth and beauty, she is at least as guarded and damaged as the friend who shows up, unexpected, in her seedy little apartment.

Moss finds the expressive depth in women for whom words (and much more) have failed, and director Anne Kauffman lets the short, wary scenes build into unexpected emotional transparency. There isn't a phony moment on the stage.

Naked Angels at Sharp Theater, 416 W. 42nd St., $70; 212-279-4200 or nakedangels.com.

THE METAL CHILDREN

Billy Crudup, with his boyish face and sepulchral edges, has just the right duality as the bummed-out New York writer who tumbles into a kind of Twin Peaks Midwestern town, where one of his early young-adult novels has become the source of a teen cult and a censorship crusade. Violence, sex and entertaining weirdness abound, as do thoughtful questions about the afterlife of a creative act.

Adam Rapp has written two plays here - one about a self-pitying blocked writer, the other a potential "Twilight Zone." Ultimately, he doesn't know where to take them both, but the journey, staged with enormous adventure and daring by the playwright, is quite a ride.

Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St., $65; 212-353-0303 or vineyardtheatre.org.

THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY

I am bowled over by this smart and outrageously original serious satire about, of all unlikely seductions, professional wrestling. A recent Pulitzer Prize finalist, the piece comes from Chicago as a co-production of Victory Gardens Theater and Teatro Vista, where Kristoffer Diaz is playwright in residence and director Edward Torres runs the company.

This is a joy, exploding with serious and comic vision, smart hip-hop pattery poetry, outright physical virtuosity and a fierce understanding of the ways America turns diversity and commitment into commerce. Desmin Borges is shrewd and adorable as our narrator, who works for a TV operation called The Wrestling as one of the human props who makes the winners look good by allowing himself to be pummeled. As he understands wrestling and this country, "You can't kick a guy's ass without the help of the guy whose ass you kick."

The cast is as daring as the characters are sweet, including Usman Ally as the savvy Indian who gets packaged as The Fundamentalist and Terence Archie as Chad Deity, the muscle-bound black star who understands from where his bling comes. The wrestling is astoundingly convincing, which means it is a splendid fake. The talent, however, is the real thing.

Second Stage Theatre, 305 W. 43rd St., $56-$70; 212-246-4422 or 2st.com

RESTORATION

Claudia Shear has been a singular voice and actress in the theater, first with her autobiographical "Blown Sideways Through Life," then the Mae West exploration called "Dirty Blonde." Her latest unexpected journey takes us to Florence, where an abrasive, dowdy, outspoken Brooklyn art restorer (Shear) is the unlikely choice to clean Michelangelo's "David" for the statue's 500th birthday.

Christopher Ashley has directed a lovely cast, including Jonathan Cake as an improbably dashing museum guard, on a stage dominated by significant pieces of David. Shear brings us into the psychology of artistic and temperamental obsession with her usual unassuming intelligence.

New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. Fourth St., $65; 212-279-4200 or nytw.org