Two new young playwrights with star power

Entire seasons have been known to fly by without a new playwright to celebrate. Now we have two.

They could hardly be more different, in both superficial and deep ways.

Jesse Eisenberg -- author and co-star of the comedy, "Asuncion," at the Cherry Lane Theatre -- is famous as the Oscar-nominated actor whose merciless portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network" seemed even more real than the real guy.

Stephen Karam, whose "Sons of the Prophet" is at Roundabout's Pels Theatre, is so little known that most theater insiders couldn't pick him out of a lineup. That should change fast.

'Sons of the Prophet'

First things first. This is a devastating new play, elegant and subtle and infused with the kind of wit that understands how perilously life lingers near the emotional abyss.

We are in a Pennsylvania town that the rust belt forgot. Joseph (the smartly empathetic Santino Fontana) has taken a small-time publishing job with Gloria, a woman he rightly describes as a "wealthy deranged woman" (the blissfully, hilariously uncompromising Joanna Gleason) because he needs the health insurance.

We don't know what's wrong with him. He doesn't know either, but his body hurts so much that Joseph, a champion runner in high school, is unmoored from his physical self. Meanwhile, his father just died after a freak accident caused by a prank and his ailing, bigoted and pious uncle (Yusef Bulos, perfectly cranky) has moved in. His gay teenage brother (the flamboyantly spiky Chris Perfetti) says Joseph, already 29, will be alone unless he sends out more clearly-gay signals.

Yes, two motherless, now fatherless gay brothers. As people tend to say around this family, "What are the odds?"

That's not all people say to this family. Lebanese-Americans, they happen to be distant relatives of the self-help poet Kahlil Gibran. Like his bestseller "The Prophet," the play titles its sections "On Home," "On Teaching," etc.

Gloria, disgraced by her own scandal and desperate for a publishing hit, leaps to the idea that Joseph should exploit his kinship with Gibran in a book that exploits his very private family's tragedies.

"Grief porn" is what Karam calls America's lust for other people's suffering. Also feeding the lust is an ambitious young gay journalist (Charles Socarides), and being victimized by it is the black football star (Jonathan Louis Dent) responsible for the prank.

All this, and more, accumulates with head-bending unpredictability in Peter DuBois' expertly lean production. Karam takes us to a world both exotic and familiar, a family with novel insight into everyday geography, twisting roots in Maronite Catholicism and experience in the overlapping absurdities of babble-mouthed racism.

For all the brutal humor and gothic misery, the play leaves us with an uneasy forgiveness that comes from mature playwrighting. In 2007, Roundabout opened its off-Off-Broadway black-box theater with Karam's narrower but still thrilling "Speech & Debate." Roundabout commissioned this new work and gave it the major showcase it deserves.

Good for everybody.

'Asuncion'

Eisenberg and fellow offbeat Hollywood star Justin Bartha (of "Hangover" fame and infamy) give bravura comic performances as Edgar and Vinny -- a couple of awful guys who, in different ways, trust their own superiority with almost endearing ignorance.

Eisenberg doesn't know how to end this quick-witted four-person comedy about covert racism -- and homosexual panic -- under the hyper-liberal buddy-boy veneer. But until the energy begins to dribble away (with, oh, dear, not another acid trip), this is an almost ridiculously enjoyable portrait of slacker trauma among would-be intellectuals in a tiny grungy off-campus apartment near a small-town New York university.

"Asuncion" is named after an attractive young Filipino woman (Camille Mana with a take-no-prisoners daring) who temporarily moves in. She has been dropped off by Edgar's low-level stockbroker brother (Remy Auberjonois in an increasingly surprising performance). He says his new wife needs to stay there, though, he assures the guys, "we are not in any danger, don't worry."

Eisenberg plays Edgar as a pale, smirking noodle of an un-working journalist, a mopheaded, adorable, self-deluding leech who excuses his muggers and apologizes "for America." He is in sexless S&M bondage to Vinny, a bully whom he boasts, mistakenly, is his former professor. Bartha kicks off the odd physical exuberance of director Kip Fagan's production by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with a lengthy, wordless scene at his Casio keyboard, establishing the grandiosity of a black-studies graduate student who wears beads.

Scholarly treatises are waiting to be written about white guys who create plays about how gorgeous minority women splinter their liberal facade -- see David Mamet's "Race" and Jeff Talbott's "The Submission" (currently running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre). Meanwhile, to take "Asuncion" too seriously would be to miss the fun.

"Sons of the Prophet," Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.; $86; 212-719-1300; roundabouttheatre.org.

"Asuncion," Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St.; $76; 212-352-3101; rattlestick.org.