Outdoor productions, especially those in Central Park, sometimes end up fighting their environment. Competing for attention with sparkling lakes and the occasional park services vehicle can be difficult, as the audience’s gaze drifts off to the horizon. The New York Classical Theater, in their spirited production of Aphra Behn’s “The Feigned Courtesans,” controls our wandering eyes by making us wander. As dueling lovers rush up hills to keep their dawn appointments, we chase after them, trying to keep up with the action.

Behn, famous for being the first professional female playwright, wrote works with ready commercial appeal. She incorporated all the usual 17th century crowd-pleasing hijinks into her light-heeled story: Professions of undying love from afar, a buffoon and a prig both roundly fleeced by an upstart servant, and some wildly unconvincing cross-dressing by women on the run. She also, however, brought a tart cynicism to the fray – she and her characters are too clear-eyed by half to quite believe their own romance.

The confusing plot involves three Italian ladies, all chased from home by unwelcome matches, and all in disguise to catch their preferred mates. At first they don the usual breeches and big floppy hats, running around with relative impunity as sword-wielding young men. This, they soon discover, is no way to catch a husband, so they swap their scabbards for push-up corsets and disguise themselves as courtesans. With a trusty servant as “pimp,” they make assignations, speak saucy couplets, and generally enslave every man they meet. Innocence may fillet a man, but they need the decolletage to reel him in.

The production does wear rather thin – Behn’s interchangeably assertive heroines grow tiresome, and the buffoon’s comic interludes aren’t funny. But the cast speaks Behn’s language with confidence and clarity – one of the many rewards of classical training (or perhaps the quality of speech coach Barbara Adrian.)

Director Stephen Burdman, also the artistic drector of the company, whisks the play and its straggling audience up hill and down dale. By the time the faux-courtesans and their suitors are struggling around in the dark, mistaking each other’s identities at top speed, actual night has fallen. It’s no small thrill to race around in the pitch-black park, watching swords clash by moon and flashlight. In fact, it feels forbidden – and as the Italian ladies would tell you, transgression is the key to pleasure.

***

Anna Rosa Sigurdardottir is a playwright. Now that you know, there are very few remaining reasons to see her interminable one-woman piece “Plums in New York.” During an hour and a half, Ms. Sigurdardottir insists repeatedly that, “I am a writer. I am a playwright. I am the author of this play.” She is convincing on this one point, though I don’t know that thanks are in order. Instead, she meets her desperate need for initiation, for some official recognition of her profession, with aimless wanderings about New York and a mild spiritual possession.

Gudrun, Ms. Sigurdardottir’s alterego, dreams in Iceland of New York. She’s toting around an unfinished script about Strindberg, and he was a great one for crazy trips. So she obeys her vision and comes to the Big Apple. After imposing unforgivably on an American friend and indulging in cheap epiphanies at ground zero, she checks into a hotel to battle her demons. Strindberg, that woman-hating lunatic, comes to inhabit her right arm, so Gudrun takes a dance class with him in tow and then rushes home to write a few pages of impenetrable gibberish.

The gibberish shows sparks of imagination, at least; the cocktail of self-importance and pretension that surrounds it does not. By the time Ms. Sigurdardottir has put her clothes to rights and accuses us of thinking she’s a “psycho,” any patience with her appropriation of Strindberg’s craziness is at an end. His “Inferno” diaries, which chronicle real depression and psychosis, employ dizzying images of paranoia, like twigs that speak to him and an electric bedstead operated by vindictive nuns. Ms. Siguradottir’s imagination stretches to an elevator ride that goes on too long. It’s not the only thing that does.