Two from this season's Signature Theatre resident playwrights

The Signature Theatre's two new resident playwrights this season are popular veteran A.R. Gurney and the poetically intense Naomi Wallace. They could not be more different, yet both have been given the Signature stamp with thoughtful, passionate productions.

'The Wayside Motor Inn'

This is a real find. Dismissed as too confusing in 1977, "The Wayside Motor Inn" uncovers in this revival an altogether lucid, compelling and entertaining work that overlaps five stories in a single motel room outside Boston in the late '70s.

And nobody is a stereotype. Everyone, except perhaps the overly naive college girl, is a fully drawn individual whose concerns are remarkably timeless -- even when the technology around them seems almost quaint.

Directed with subtle delicacy and clarity by Lila Neugebauer, the people live out their separate concerns, wandering in and out of the generic room, often onstage simultaneously, without disturbing a molecule of our interest in the others.

Jon DeVries and Lizbeth Mackay are wrenching as the long-married couple visiting a new grandchild. Marc Kudisch and Will Pullen play out the deep conflict between an insecure go-getter of a father and his unhappy son on their way to a Harvard interview. And Jenn Lyon is irresistible as the waitress who delivers funny but remarkably prescient social observations to the lonely, hustling salesman (Quincy Dunn-Baker).

In one of many memorable moments, the ailing, stoical husband cries out, "I just want someone to listen to my heart." Gurney, whose "Love Letters" gets the all-star treatment on Broadway this month, is listening.

'And I and Silence'

Naomi Wallace's "And I and Silence" involves women in prison, but don't accuse her of riding the trendy coattails of "Orange Is the New Black." The American playwright, whose serious work is better known in Europe than in her own country, is an uncompromising, imaginative writer whose prose-poetry style seldom gets in the way of her keenly observed characters.

The 90-minute drama feels grim, slow and hard to love for a while, as we follow two poor women -- one black, one white -- toggling back and forth between a 1950 prison cell and their tiny one-room apartment in 1959. Different fine actresses play the two women at different ages, and director Caitlin McLeod didn't cast them to look alike. But their stories -- hopeless poverty at home, racism outside -- draw all four together until, ultimately, the tragedy hits home.